TAYLOR, THOMAS (1758-1835), English writer, generally called "the Platonist," was born in London on the 15th of May 1758, and lived there till his death on the 1st of November 1835. He was sent to St Paul's school, but was soon removed to Sheerness, where he spent several years with a relative who was engaged in the dockyard. He then began to study for the dissenting ministry, but an imprudent marriage and pecuniary difficulties compelled him to abandon the idea. He became a schoolmaster, a clerk in Lubbock's banking-house, and from 1798-1806 was assistant secretary to the society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce, which post he resigned to devote himself to the study of philosophy. He had the good fortune to obtain the patronage of the duke of Norfolk and of a Mr Meredith, a retired tradesman of literary tastes, who assisted him to publish several of his works. These mainly consisted of translations of the whole or part of the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Pausanias, Porphyry, Ocellus Lucanus, and the Orphic hymns. His efforts were unfavourably—almost contemptuously—received, but, in spite of defects of scholarship and lack of critical faculty, due recognition must be awarded to the indomitable industry with which he overcame early difficulties. He figures as the "modern Pletho" in Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature and in his novel Vaurien, and as "England's gentile priest" in Mathias's Pursuits of Literature.
TAYLOR, TOM (1817–1880), English dramatist and editor of Punch, was born at Bishop Wearmouth, near Sunderland, on the 19th of October 1817. After attending school there, and studying for two sessions at Glasgow University, he in 1837 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow. Subsequently he held for two years the professorship of English literature at University College, London. He was called to the bar (Middle Temple) in November 1846, and went on the northern circuit until, in 1850, he became assistant secretary of the Board of Health. On the reconstruction of the Board in 1854 he was made secretary, and on its abolition his services were transferred to a department of the Home Office, retiring on a pension in 1876. In his very early years Tom Taylor had shown a predilection for the drama, and had been in the habit of performing dramatic pieces with a number of children in a loft over a brewer's stable. Four burlesques of his were produced at the Lyceum in 1844. He made his first hit with To Parents and Guardians, brought out at the Lyceum in 1845. He also wrote some burlesques in conjunction with Albert Smith and Charles Kenny, and collaborated with Charles Reade in Masks and Faces (1852). Before the close of his life his dramatic pieces numbered over 100, amongst the best known of which are Our American Cousin (1858), produced by Laura Keene in New York, in which Sothern created the part of Lord Dundreary; Still Waters Run Deep (1855); Victims (1857); the Contested Election (1859); the Overland Route (1860); the Ticket of Leave Man (1863); Anne Boleyn (1875); and Joan of Arc (1871). He was perhaps the most popular dramatist of his time; but, if his chief concern was the construction of a popular acting play, the characters in his dramas are clearly and consistently drawn, and the dialogue is natural, nervous and pointed. In his blank verse historical dramas, Anne Boleyn and Joan of Arc, he was not so successful.
Taylor had begun his career as a journalist when he first came to London. He very soon became connected with the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News, for which he wrote leaders. He was on the staff of Punch until 1874, when he succeeded Shirley Brooks as editor. He occasionally appeared with success in amateur theatricals, more especially in the character of Adam in As You Like It and of Jasper in A Sheep in Wolfs Clothing. He had some talent for painting, and for many years was art critic to The Times and the Graphic. He died at Lavender Sweep, Wandsworth, on the 12 th of July 1880.
Apart from the drama, Tom Taylor's chief contributions to literature are his biographies of painters, viz., Autobiography of B. R. Haydon (1853); Autobiography and Correspondence of C. R. Leslie, R.A. (1860); and Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1865), which had been left in a very incomplete state by Leslie. His Historical Dramas appeared in one volume in 1877. He also edited, with a memorial preface, Pen Sketches from a Vanished Hand, selected from Papers of the late Mortimer Collins.
TAYLOR, WILLIAM (1765-1836), English man of letters, son of a Norwich manufacturer, was born in that city on the 7th of November 1765. He belonged to the Unitarian community, and went to a school kept at Palgrave, Suffolk, by Rochemont Barbauld, husband of Anna Letitia Barbauld, where Frank Sayers (1763-1817) was among his schoolmates. He travelled on the Continent for some years to perfect himself in foreign languages. William Taylor and his father were both in sympathy with the French Revolution, and belonged to a "revolution society" at Norwich. In 1791 the disturbed condition of affairs induced the elder Taylor to wind up his business, and from this time William devoted himself to letters. He was an enthusiast for German poetry, and did great service to English literature by translations of Bürger's Lenore (1790, printed 1796), of Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1790, printed 1805), of Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris (1790, printed 1793), and of four of Wieland's Dialogues of the Gods (1795). He was a prolific writer of review articles, in which his knowledge of foreign literature served as a useful standard of criticism. Much of this material was made use of in his most important work, his Historic Survey of German Poetry (3 vols., 1828-30). He also edited the works of his friend Sayers with a memoir (1823). He died at Norwich on the 5th of March 1836.
See a Memoir of the Life and Writings of the late W. Taylor of Norwich, by John Warden Robberds (2 vols., 1843); Georg Herzfeld, William Taylor von Norwich (1897). Taylor is well known to readers of George Borrow by the portrait of him as the "elder individual" in the 23rd chapter of Lavengro.
TAYLOR, ZACHARY (1784-1850), twelfth president of the United States, was born in Orange county, Virginia, on the 24th of September 1784. During the following year his father, Colonel Richard Taylor, a veteran of the War of Independence, migrated to Kentucky, settling near Louisville, and thereafter played an important part in the wars and politics of his adopted state. The boyhood and youth of Zachary Taylor were thus passed in the midst of the stirring frontier scenes of early Kentucky, and from this experience he acquired the hardihood and resoluteness that characterized his later life, although he inevitably lacked the advantages of a thorough education. In May 1808 Taylor received a commission as first lieutenant in the 7th United States Infantry, and for the next few years was employed in routine duties. Early in 1812 he was made captain, and during the ensuing hostilities with Great Britain distinguished himself by his gallant defence against the Indians of Fort Harrison, a stockade in central Indiana. For this he was breveted major, and in May 1814 received a regular major's commission, but being reduced at the conclusion of the war to the rank of captain, temporarily left the service. In May 1816 he was reinstated as major, and in 1819 was promoted to be a lieutenant-colonel; and in the routine discharge of his duties he was stationed at various posts on the western frontier. In 1832, as colonel, he took part in the Black Hawk War, and was the officer to whom Black Hawk surrendered; later he occasionally acted as Indian agent along the upper Mississippi.
In 1836 Taylor was ordered from Wisconsin to take command against the Seminoles in Florida. On the 25th of December 1837, after a difficult campaign, he inflicted a severe defeat upon the Indians at the battle of Okeechobee, and for this was breveted brigadier-general. Then followed four years of harassing service in the Florida Everglades, whence he passed to the command of the First Department of the army, with headquarters at Fort Jesup, Louisiana.
While at New Orleans in 1845, Taylor received orders from President Polk to march his troops into Texas, as soon as that state should accept the terms of annexation proposed by the Joint Resolution of Congress of March 2, 1845. Later in June Polk, who assumed that the Rio Grande rather than the Nueces was the south-western boundary of Texas, ordered him to take up a position at the mouth of the Sabine, or at some other
