TAYLOR, JOSEPH (c. 1586–c. 1653), English actor, is mentioned in the folio Shakespeare of 1623 as one of the twenty-six who took principal parts in all of these plays. There is a legend that he was trained by Shakespeare to play Hamlet, and that he succeeded Burbage in this and other parts. Certain it is that in many of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays he had a leading rôle, and he is one of the ten actors who signed the dedication of the first folio of these dramatists (1647).
TAYLOR, MICHAEL ANGELO (1757–1834), English politician, was a son of Sir Robert Taylor (1714–1788), the architect, and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, becoming a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn in 1774. He entered the House of Commons as member for Poole in 1784, and, with the exception of the short period from 1802 to 1806, remained a member of parliament until 1834, although not as the representative of the same constituency. In parliament Taylor showed himself anxious to curtail the delays in the Court of Chancery, and to improve the lighting and paving of the London streets; and he was largely instrumental in bringing about the abolition of the pillory. At first a supporter of the younger Pitt, he soon veered round to the side of Fox and the Whigs, favoured parliamentary reform, and was a personal friend of the regent, afterwards George IV. He was on the committee which managed the impeachment of Warren Hastings; was made a privy councillor in 1831; and died in London on the 16th of July 1834. Taylor is chiefly known in connexion with the Metropolitan Paving Act of 1817, which is still referred to as “Michael Angelo Taylor’s Act.” Often called “Chicken Taylor” because of his reference to himself as a “mere chicken in the law,” he is described by Sir Spencer Walpole as “a pompous harrister, with a little body and a loud voice.” Taylor’s father, Sir Robert, was the founder of the Taylorian Institution at Oxford.
TAYLOR, NATHANIEL WILLIAM (1786–1858), American
Congregational theologian, was born in New Milford, Connecticut,
on the 23rd of June 1786, grandson of Nathaniel
Taylor (1722–1800), pastor at New Milford. He graduated at
Yale College in 1807, studied theology under Timothy Dwight,
and in 1812 became pastor of the First Church of New Haven.
From 1822 until his death in New Haven on the 10th of March
1858 he was Dwight professor of didactic theology at Yale.
He was the last notable representative of the New England
School, in which his predecessors were the younger Edwards,
John Smalley (1734–1820) and Nathaniel Emmons. In the
Yale Divinity School his influence was powerful, and in 1833
one of his foremost opponents, Bennet Tyler (1783–1858),
founded in East Windsor a Theological Institute to offset
Taylor’s teaching at Yale.
Taylorism, sometimes called the “New Haven” theology, was an attempt to defend Calvinism from Arminian attacks, and the defence itself was accused of Arminianism and Pelagianism by A. A. Hodge of Princeton and Leonard Woods of Andover. Taylor’s theology was distinctively infra-lapsarian; it disagreed with Samuel Hopkins and Emmons in rejecting the theory of “divine efficiency “ and in arguing that man can choose the right “even if he won't”;—distinguishing like Edwards between natural ability and moral inability; it distinguished sensibility or susceptibility as something different from will or understanding, without moral qualities, to which the appeal for right choice may be made; and it made self-love (a term borrowed from Dugald Stewart, connoting the innocent love of happiness and distinct from selfishness) the particular feeling appealed to by the influences of the law and gospel.
He wrote Practical Sermons (1858; edited by Noah Porter); Lectures.on the Moral Government of God (2 vols., 1859), and Essays and Lectures upon Select Topics in Revealed Theology (1859), all published posthumously.
TAYLOR, PHILIP MEADOWS (1808–1876), Anglo-Indian administrator and novelist, was born at Liverpool on the 25th of September 1808. At the age of fifteen he was sent out to India to become a clerk to a Bombay merchant. On his arrival the house was in financial difficulties, and he was glad to accept in 1824 a commission in the service of his highness the nizam, to which service he remained devotedly attached throughout his long career. He was speedily transferred from military duty to a civil appointment, and in this capacity he acquired a knowledge of the languages and the people of Southern India which has seldom been equalled. He studied the laws, the geology, the antiquities of the country; he was alternately judge, engineer, artist and man of letters, for on his return to England in 1840 on furlough he published the first of his Indian novels, Confesssions of a Thug, in which he reproduced, with singular vivacity and truth, the scenes which he had heard described by the chief actors in them. This book was followed by a series of tales, Tippoo Sultaun (1840), Tara (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), Seeta (1872), and A Noble Queen (1878), all illustrating periods of Indian history and society, and giving a prominent place to the native character, for which and the native institutions and traditions he had a great regard and respect. Returning to India he acted from 1840 to 1853 as correspondent for The Times. He also wrote a Student’s Manual of the History of India (1870). About 1850, Meadows Taylor was appointed by the nizam’s government to administer, during a long minority, the principality of the young raja of Shorapore. He succeeded without any European assistance in raising this small territory to a high degree of prosperity, and such was his influence with the natives that on the occurrence of the mutiny in Bengal he held his ground without military support. Colonel Taylor, whose merits were now recognized and acknowledged by the British government of India—although he had never been in the service of the Company—was subsequently appointed to the deputy commissionership of the Western ceded districts, where he succeeded in establishing a new assessment of revenues at once more equitable to the cultivators and more productive to the government. By indefatigable perseverance he had raised himself from the condition of a half-educated lad, without patronage, and without even the support of the Company, to the successful government of some of the most important provinces of India, 36,000 square miles in extent and with a population of more than five millions. On his retirement from service in 1860 he was made a C.S.I. and given a pension. Taylor died at Mentone on the 13th of May 1876.
See Meadows Taylor’s The Story of My Life (1877).
TAYLOR, ROWLAND (d. 1555), English Protestant martyr,
was born at Rothbury, Northumberland; he took minor orders
at Norwich in 1528 and graduated LL.B. at Cambridge in 1530
and LL.D. in 1534. Adopting reformed views he was made
chaplain by Cranmer in 1540 and presented to the living of
Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 1544. In Whitsun week, 1547, he preached
a “notable sermon” at St Paul’s Cross, and was given the third
stall in Rochester cathedral. In 1549 he was placed on a commission
to examine Anabaptists, and in 1551 he was appointed
chancellor to Bishop Ridley, select preacher at Canterbury,
and a commissioner for the reform of the canon law; in 1552
Coverdale made him archdeacon of Exeter. Apparently he
advocated the cause of Lady Jane Grey, for on the 25th of
July I 553, only six days after Mary’s proclamation as queen,
he was committed to the custody of the sheriff of Essex. He
was released not long afterwards, and with the support of his
parishioners offered strenuous resistance to the restoration of
the Mass. He was consequently imprisoned in the King’s
Bench prison on the 26th of March 1554. The sturdy protestantism
of Taylor and his flock, who seem to have caused
various commotions, marked him out for the special enmity
of Mary’s government; and he was one of the first to suffer
when in January 1555 parliament had once more given the
clerical courts liberty of jurisdiction. He was sentenced on
the 22nd, excommunicated on the 29th, degraded by Bonner
on the 4th of February, and burnt on the 9th at Aldham
Common near Hadleigh. His blameless character had made
a great impression on his age, and he was commemorated in
many popular ballads. He was regarded as the ideal of a
Protestant parish priest; he was married and had nine children.
The alleged descent of Jeremy Taylor from him has not been
proved.
See Thomas Quinton Stow’s Memoirs of Rowland Taylor (1833); Dict. of Nat. Biogr. lv. 463–4, and authorities there cited.
