garded her instructions as the most valuable part of the discipline through which he had passed."[1]
In 1779 Taylor made the first of three visits to the continent, this time through the Netherlands, France and Italy. In April, 1781, he again left for the continent, and about the middle of July settled at Detmold, Westphalia, for the study of German.[2]
There he spent a year and a few days, becoming an enthusiastic student of the new culture, of which, not many years afterwards, he was to be an early exponent in his native country. As we are not now interested in his later work, it may be hastily summarized. It consisted of much reviewing of German literature, much criticism of more general character in various reviews, some further translations of high character, and finally in the later years of his life his Historic Survey of German Poetry.
Taylor's residence and study in Germany fully account for his later devotion to German literature. Yet it was not at once to bear fruit in translation or exposition of German poetry. This was partly owing to Taylor's association with his father in business from 1784 to 1788, and less actively until the business was given up in 1791. Yet Taylor's interest in literature continued during these years, and he was eager to devote his whole time to it. A further interest in German is perhaps associated with that of his friend Sayers. The latter had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1788 and, devoting himself to literature soon after, published his Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology in 1790. As already noted, Taylor visited Sayers at Edinburgh in the
- ↑ Robberds, Life of William Taylor, I, p. 8. The quotation as to Mrs. Barbauld is from Taylor's Memoir of Sayers, p. xii, prefixed to his edition of Sayers's Works. In that place also (p. xviii) he tells us how Mrs. Barbauld taught English to the young boys of the school. In this age of striving after new methods it is worth repeating: "Among the instructions bestowed at Palgrave, Dr. Sayers has repeatedly observed to me, that he most valued the lessons in English composition superintended by Mrs. Barbauld. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the boys were called in separate classes to her apartment; she read a fable, a short story, or a moral essay, to them aloud, and then sent them back into the school-room to write it out on the slates in their own words. Each exercise was separately overlooked by her; the faults in grammar were obliterated, the vulgarisms were chastised, the idle epithets were cancelled, and a distinct reason was always assigned for every correction; so that the arts of inditing and criticising were in some degree learnt together."
In her Autobiography (I, 298) Harriet Martineau says of the same: "Mrs. Barbauld . . . helped him [her husband] in his great school at Palgrave in Suffolk, by taking charge of the very little boys. William Taylor and my father had stood at her knee with their slates." - ↑ A month later the young Stanley was at Brunswick; see p. 12. Taylor's third visit to the continent, in which we are less interested, was begun in May, 1790. On the ninth of that month he shows his revolutionary sentiments by writing in a letter: "At length I have kissed the earth on the land of liberty." Stanley was also a sympathizer with the Revolution. In his Praeterita he writes: "In 1789, only six years afterwards, I was in Paris, and found workmen demolishing the last few towers [of the Bastille]. . . . I could not resist the temptation of having a share in the work of demolition; I borrowed a pickaxe and brought down a few fragments of what remained, which I put into my pocket and which I still have."—Early Married Life, p. 32.
