at his desk and learned a good deal of Welsh, Danish,
Hebrew, Arabic, Gaelic, and Armenian, making translations from these
languages in prose and verse. In "Wild Wales" he recalls translating
Danish poems "over the desk of his ancient master, the gentleman
solicitor of East Anglia," and learning Welsh by reading a Welsh
"Paradise Lost" side by side with the original, and by having lessons on
Sunday afternoons at his father's house from a groom named Lloyd.

His chief master was William Taylor, the "Anglo-Germanist" of "Lavengro."
Taylor was born in 1765. He studied in Germany as a youth and returned
to England with a great enthusiasm for German literature. He translated
Goethe's "Iphigenia" (1793), Lessing's "Nathan" (1791), Wieland's
"Dialogues of the Gods," etc. (1795); he published "Tales of Yore,"
translated from several languages, and a "Letter concerning the two first
chapters of Luke," in 1810, "English Synonyms discriminated" in 1813, and
an "Historical Survey of German Poetry," interspersed with various
translations, in 1823-30. He was bred among Unitarians, read Hume,
Voltaire and Rousseau, disliked the Church, and welcomed the French
Revolution, though he was no friend to "the cause of national ambition
and aggrandisement." He belonged to a Revolution Society at Norwich, and
in 1790 wrote from Paris calling the National Assembly "that well-head of
philosophical legislation, whose pure streams are now overflowing the
fairest country upon earth and will soon be sluiced off into the other
realms of Europe, fertilising all with the living energy of its waters."
In 1791 he and his father withdrew their capital from manufacture and
William Taylor devoted himself to literature. Hazlitt speaks of the
"style of philosophical criticism which has been the boast of the
'Edinburgh Review,'" as first introduced into the "Monthly Review" by
Taylor in 1796. Scott said that Taylor's translation of Burger's
"Lenore" made him a poet. Sir James Mackintosh learned the Taylorian
language for the sake of the man's "vigour and originality"--"As the
Hebrew is studied for one book, so is the Taylorian by me for one
author."

{picture: William Taylor, of Norwich: page66.jpg}

I will give a few hints at the nature of his speculation. In one of his
letters he speaks of stumbling on "the new hypothesis that the
Nebuchadnezzar of Scripture is the Cyrus of Greek History," and second,
that "David, the Jew, a favourite of this pri