mutual elevation and
refinement.

"The salon of Susannah Taylor, the mother of Sarah Austin, the wife of
John Taylor, hymn writer and deacon of the seminal chapel, the once noted
Octagon, in Norwich, included in its zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs.
Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie,
Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker
Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics
compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which
Borrow was introduced by Sayer's private biographer, the eminent and
aforesaid William Taylor" [no relation of _the_ "Taylors of Norwich"]
"whose 'Jail-delivery of German Studies' the jealous Thomas Carlyle
stigmatized in 1830 as the work of a natural-born English Philistine."

Nevertheless, in spite of _the_ Taylors and the Martineaus, says William
Taylor's biographer, Robberds: "The love of society almost necessarily
produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and,
though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an immoderate
excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of
nature and exhausted them before the usual period." Taylor died in 1836
and was remembered best for his drinking and for his bloated appearance.
Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography:

"William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then
of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and
then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and
children aghast;--defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had
rescued him from it: information given as certain that 'God Save the
King' was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon,--that Christ was
watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide
Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the
mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists. When
William Taylor began with 'I firmly believe,' we knew that something
particularly incredible was coming. . . . 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, and getting her there
with her shoes as clean as if she had cr