t knowledge, the advancement of kind and dignified
sentiment and conduct.

We note here the reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William
Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny
was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet
Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of
poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her
_Autobiography_, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's
_Memoir of William Taylor_, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of
William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father's. She admits,
indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose 'exemplary filial duty was a
fine spectacle to the whole city,' and she continues:

His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his
endurance of his father's brutality of temper and manners, and
his watchfulness in ministering to the old man's comfort in his
infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor
guiding his blind mother to chapel ... we could forgive
anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner-table.

Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor's virtues
or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the
mark. Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that:

The great days of the Gurneys were not come yet. The remarkable
family from which issued Mrs. Fry and Joseph John Gurney were
then a set of dashing young people, dressed in gay riding
habits and scarlet boots, and riding about the country to balls
and gaieties of all sorts.

As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs. Fry was the mother of
fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had
been twice a widower. Both brother and sister were zealous
philanthropists at this date. And so we may take with some measure of
qualification Harriet Martineau's many strictures upon Taylor's drinking
habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although
perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys
were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew,
then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his
diocese. Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that
these charges of intemperance were 'grossly and unjustly exaggerated.'
William Taylor's life is pleasant