Still vantages, or on the delays and imperfec tions which have arisen from them. I am willing to hope that these will be leniently judged when I state, that almost every line of this work has been written, revised and corrected for the press, in those hours which all but the reveller and the student give up to repose. Having engaged in it, I have persevered to its completion; not expecting for myself emolument or celebrity, but anxious only to perform an act of justice to the memory of William Taylor, by letting the world know who and what he was. For this purpose alone I have endeavoured to display the excellent qualities of his head and heart, and to plant the standard of his fame before those by whom he was mistaken, or to whom he was misrepresented. If I have attained this object, it is the only reward that I seek for my labours. Norwich, August 8th, 1843. J. W. R. CONTENTS. VOL. I. Mr. Taylor's first engagement with the Monthly Review and Monthly Magazine 120 MEMOIR OF THE LATE WILLIAM TAYLOR, OF NORWICH. CHAPTER I. 1765 to 1782. MR. TAYLOR'S BIRTH AND EDUCATION. A LIFE of lettered ease, spent in provincial retirement (for such was that of William Taylor), can offer little to interest the general reader; still there are not a few who entertain a natural and laudable desire to learn all that can be known respecting those who have left enduring records of their names. To them it is not only pleasant to live over with the eminent and the learned the whole course of their early training and maturer studies, but it is also useful to observe how talents that have enlightened a world were developed and grew up. They find instruction in exploring the secret fountains of thoughts which have awakened the thinking faculties of others, and tracing the formation of opinions which have become to us beacons of everlasting truth. Such materials for biography are not the product of any exclusive locality. They may be found in the village school-room as well as at Westminster, Harrow, or Eton. They may be obtained as readily beneath the roof of the private tutor, as in the lecture-rooms of Edinburgh, the halls of Oxford, or the Senatehouse of Cambridge. They may be collected as abundantly in the quiet seclusion of a country residence, as on the public and busy theatre of the metropolis. So also as regards the eminently gifted, but uncelebrated author of English Synonyms discriminated,' his quiet and unostentatious course, seldom stretching beyond the social circles of his native city, may guide the reflecting student of the human mind to as rich a vein of observation as can be met with in the brilliant career of others, to whom fashion or intrigue, good fortune or merit itself, may have given a more excursive and popular notoriety. Such at least is the deep and universal impression which he has left on the minds of those who knew him; and it is in compliance with their wishes, founded upon this conviction, that the writer of the present memoir has undertaken his gratifying and honourable task-too readily perhaps forgetting his own incompetency in his |