Eight Friends of the Great/4

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Eight Friends of the Great
by William Prideaux Courtney

John Taylor of the "Sun"

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774944Eight Friends of the Great — John Taylor of the "Sun"William Prideaux Courtney

JOHN TAYLOR OF THE "SUN."

"Jack" Taylor can pair off with "Jack" Warner. The parson excelled his friend in possessing that natural gaiety of disposition which bubbles up at every moment. The journalist on the other hand had less flow of humour, but he could draw on his memory for a more abundant wealth of anecdote. They had in common the gift of attracting to themselves crowds of friends and acquaintances. Only one person in that age could rival them in the field of friendship. This was James Hare, the Whig politician known as, "the Hare and many friends." His associates were found among the fashionable set of London or the Whigs of high life who sat in the House of Commons. Warner's friends were chiefly in the ranks of the less exclusive and more advanced reformers of the period. The Sun was a Tory journal and "Jack" Taylor was reckoned among the adherents of that party in the State. Not many political personages cross the pages of his reminiscences, but he does record with pride that old Eldon—a canny and not unkindly old gentleman who knew the value of a newspaper on his side—often "favoured him with his arm when we happened to be walking the same way," and that in the tea-room, after "the last celebration in 1829, of Mr. Pitt's birthday," the ex-lord-chancellor greeted him with marked favour. Taylor's friends were mostly among the celebrities who trod the boards of the London theatres. He knew them all and had written something as an extra attraction for all their benefit-nights. With them he gathered around him many a veteran in letters. His branch of the great family of Taylor came from the city of Norwich. If its members were originally of the same stock as the critic and philologer, known as "Taylor of Norwich," they showed very different qualities in life. For generations they were medical men and four of them were conspicuous in the world as oculists. The progenitor of these eye-doctors was John Taylor a general practitioner in that capital of East Anglia. He lived amid the quiet surroundings of a cathedral town, not courting the publicity of life in London. Dr. Monsey who studied medicine at Norwich and was afterwards the shrewd but loose-speaking old physician of Chelsea Hospital, testified from local knowledge to his high character in his profession, and to his reputation, acquired from a "grave and dignified" aspect and demeanor, among his neighbours of supernatural knowledge, so that they consulted him as a conjuror. Great as his knowledge may have been, he could not have formed even a guess at the future career of his elder son, the second John Taylor who called himself and was known to the world as, the Chevalier Taylor. Probably no one was more surprised than the father at his son's erratic course in life.

The Chevalier who was born on the 16th of August, 1703, studied surgery at Sᵗ Thomas's hospital in London under the guidance of William Cheselden, the celebrated operator but soon devoted his especial attention to the diseases of the eye. He began life in the city of his birth, not disdaining the scanty fee of the ordinary surgeon but still continuing his study of the eye. This little society soon became too hot for a man of his vast but wayward energy and he began travelling in quest of practice through his native land. By the time that he was 30 the greater part of the British Isles was familiar ground to him.