INTRODUCTION
This Story of my Life has always seemed to me to be an illustration of Longfellow's catch:
- What is an autobiography?
- It is what a biography ought to be.
The interest in this case is chiefly literary and romantic. Meadows Taylor has been called, while the word still kept a noble meaning, the last of the Adventurers. Here is a surprisingly well-written record of the wanderer, so frequent in English life since Plassey, who 'runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans'.
I was glad to be asked, before sitting down to write about him, why Colonel Taylor should be reprinted at this date by the Oxford University Press. The least thought provides a sufficient answer : For the rare beauty of his character, and as the author of the autobiography and of his three earlier novels, Confessions of a Thug, Tippoo Sultaun, and Tara. Of his other three novels there will be a little to say in the right place. But I have not a word to say for them as literature. Instead of helping Taylor's claim to be remembered they cruelly hamper it. Inferior work can never be merely indifferent; and the three later novels must have put off many who honestly wanted to sample the writer.
As to the History of India, that is fully dealt with in a note. The lavish extracts made from it throughout this volume suggest the good things of which it is full—touches springing from Taylor's happy personality, accounts of places and of people he knew. Never will another History of India be attempted by any one with such a loving knowledge of its
