intellectual eminences. You cannot properly 'compare' Scott and Coleridge and 'Monk' Lewis. Perhaps it is equally absurd to compare Taylor himself with critics of a more philosophical kind.
Taylor's work, in fact, represents the state of mind possible to intelligent persons at Norwich at the end of the last century, and from that point of view is highly creditable. The manufacturing circles were inclined to be good sound Whigs in politics, and inclined to Unitarianism in religion. Taylor shared Fox's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and held to the good old cause when Southey became a Tory. In religious matters he seems to have deserted Priestley for Erasmus Darwin, who spoke of Unitarianism as a feather-bed for a dying Christian, and decidedly preferred Voltaire's reformation to Luther's. 'Religion,' however, he admitted, 'if a blemish in the male is surely a grace in the female sex,' and his freethinking, though tolerably obvious, was not of the militant kind. He wished only to be allowed to put forward his theories, which are apt to be such as might have pleased Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch. He identified Sesostris with Joshua, and Thales with Homer, and even Jesus the son of Sirach with the
