mother, and a mistress of a family’ (London, 1815, 12mo; 11th ed. 1822); ‘The Present of a Mistress to a Young Servant’ (London, 1816, 12mo; several editions); ‘Reciprocal Duties of Parents and Children’ (London, 1818, 12mo; 3rd ed. 1819); ‘The Family Mansion’ (London, 1819, 12mo; a French version appeared in the same year; 2nd ed. 1820); ‘Retrospection, a Tale’ (London, 1821, 12mo); ‘The Itinerary of a Traveller in the Wilderness’ (London, 1825, 12mo); and also ‘Correspondence between a Mother and her Daughter [Jane] at School’ (London, 1817, 12mo; 6th ed. 1821). Mrs. Ann Taylor died at Ongar on 4 June 1830; she was buried beside her husband under the vestry floor of Ongar chapel.
Helen Taylor (1818–1885), the daughter of Martin Taylor of Ongar (1788–1867), by his first wife, Elizabeth Venn, made a few contributions to ‘Missionary Hymns’ and the ‘Teacher’s Treasury,’ and, besides a small devotional work, ‘Sabbath Bells’ was author of ‘The Child’s Books of Homilies’ (London, 1850, 18mo). She died in 1885, and was buried at Parkstone, Dorset.
The literary productiveness of Isaac Taylor of Ongar, his collaterals, and their descendants led Mr. Galton, in his inquiry into the laws and consequences of ‘Hereditary Genius’ (1869), to illustrate from the history of the family his theory of the distribution through heredity of intellectual capacity.
[Gent. Mag. 1830, i. 378; Congreg. Magazine, 1830, p. 398; The Nation, May 1875; Taylor’s Family Pen—Memorials of the Taylor Family of Ongar, 1867, vol. i. passim; Mrs. Gilbert’s Autobiography; Bryan’s Dict. of Painters and Engravers, ed. Graves and Armstrong; Redgrave’s Dict. of English Painters; Halkett and Laing’s Dict. of Anon. and Pseudon. Lit.; Davids’s Nonconformity in Essex; Essex Review, April 1898; Tuer’s Bartolozzi and his Works; Allibone’s Dict. of English Literature; English Cyclopædia; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
TAYLOR, ISAAC (1787–1865), of Stanford Rivers, artist, author and inventor, eldest surviving son of Isaac Taylor of Ongar (1759–1829) [q. v.], was born at Lavenham, Suffolk, on 17 Aug. 1787, and shared the migrations of his family to Colchester and, at the close of 1810, to Ongar. In common with several other members of the family, he was trained to the profession of a draughtsman and engraver, and executed a number of designs for his father and for the books issued by his sister. He also executed some anatomical drawings of merit for a surgeon, and painted some excellent miniatures, one a pleasing and animated portrait of his sister Jane [q.v.], another of himself in 1817. Some of his designs, engraved by his own hand or that of his father for Boydell’s ‘Illustrations of Holy Writ’ (1820), exhibited an originality and power which excited the admiration of Rossetti, and led Alexander Gilchrist to compare them with some of the plates of William Blake (Life of Blake, 1863). But, although he showed a keen perception of artistic merit, he was never an engraver professionally, and, after a few years’ occupation as a designer of book illustrations, he turned to literature as his vocation.
From 1812 to 1816 the state of his health rendered it desirable for him to spend the winters in the west of England, and he spent most of this time at Ilfracombe and Marazion in the company of his sister, Jane Taylor [q. v.] About 1815 the accidental discovery of a copy of the works of Sulpicius Severus upon a London bookstall turned his attention to the problems presented by the corruptions of the Christian church, and led to the accumulation and study of an extensive library of patristic literature. The term ‘patristic’ appears to have been one of his numerous verbal inventions. Shortly afterwards the perusal of Bacon’s ‘De Augmentis’ excited his keen admiration for the inductive philosophy, and the combination of these two lines of study seemingly so incongruous, the Baconian and the patristic, forms the key to a great part of his intellectual life. In 1818 a great friend of the family, Josiah Conder [q. v.], then editor of the ‘Eclectic Review,’ persuaded Taylor to join the regular staff of that periodical, which already included Robert Hall (1764–1831) [q. v.], John Foster (1770–1843) [q. v.], and Olinthus Gilbert Gregory [q.v.] Four years after this appeared Taylor’s first independent literary venture, ‘The Elements of Thought’ (London, 1823, 8vo; 11th edit. 1867), first suggested apparently by his Baconian studies, and after wards recast as ‘The World of Mind’ (London, 1857, 8vo). This was followed in 1824 by a new translation of the ‘Characters of Theophrastus’ (by ‘Francis Howell,’ London, 8vo; the first edition still commands a good price, the second without the Greek text appeared in 1836). The translator added pictorial renderings of the characters drawn on the wood by himself. In 1825 there followed the ‘Memoirs, Correspondence, and Literary Remains of Jane Taylor’ (London, 1825, 2 vols. 12mo; 2nd edit. 1826; incorporated in ‘The Taylors of Ongar,’ 1867). In 1825 he settled at Stanford Rivers, about two miles from Ongar, in a rambling old-fashioned farmhouse, standing in a large garden and well fitted by its position and
