city. There he remained, with few interruptions, till his death in 1836. He never married, and was a most devoted son to his parents. He laboured conscientiously at literary pursuits until his health broke down when he was about fifty. His first biographer intimates that he did not refrain as much as was desirable from drinks for which his head was no longer sufficiently strong. One little glimpse of him, apparently about 1820, is given in Lavengro (see chap. xxiii.). Taylor is presented to us smoking steadily, calmly expounding heterodox doctrines about Shakespeare and the Bible, confessing, poor man, that his life had been a failure, and recommending his young friend to study German. He seems to have given real encouragement to Borrow's philological tastes. Taylor's first success was the translation of Lenore. Soon afterwards he translated Lessing's Nathan and Goethe's Iphigenia; but his main work was contained in contributions to the old Monthly Review—still edited when he began by the Griffiths who had been Goldsmith's taskmaster—and to other reviews, The Critical, The Annual, and so forth, which have long since retired to the dustiest shelves of old libraries. According to Hazlitt, as Mr. Herzfeld reminds us, Taylor set the example
