Taylor, SIR HENRY

Taylor, SIR HENRY, poet, was born, the son of a gentleman-farmer of unusual culture, at Bishop-Middleham in Durham, October 18, 1800. At fourteen he went to sea as midshipman, but was happy to obtain his discharge after nine miserable months, and two years later was given a clerkship in the Storekeeper-general's Department. After four years' service, including a few months in Barbadoes, he lost his post through internal official rearrangements, and returned to his father's house, Witton Hall, to spend two years of uninterrupted quiet and study. He began to write for the Quarterly, and in 1823 settled in London, having been appointed through the influence of Dr (after Sir Henry) Holland to a clerkship in the Colonial Office. Here he laboured for forty-eight years under as many as twenty-six secretaries of state, retiring only in 1872. He declined in 1847 the post of permanent under-secretary in succession to Sir James Stephen, and in 1869 was made K.C.M.G., partly for his public services, partly for his literary work—the latter also acknowledged by the D.C.L. degree at Oxford in 1862. His last days were spent at Bournemouth, and here, March 27, 1886, he ended a long and happy life, the happi- ness of which was in great measure due first to his admirable step-mother, later to his equally admirable wife, Alice Spring Rice, a daughter of Lord Monteagle. Taylor wrote four tragedies in the Shakespearian manner: Isaac Commenus (1827), Philip van Artevelde (1834)—an immediate success, Edwin the Fair (1842), and St Clement's Eve (1862); and one romantic comedy, The Virgin Widow, afterwards entitled A Sicilian Summer. In 1845 he published a small volume of lyrical poetry, and in 1847 The Eve of the Conquest and other Poems. His work in prose embraced The Statesman (1836), a collection of Baconian discourses on official life and the methods of managing men, for which, as he himself says, 'Pragmatic Precepts' would have been a better title; Notes from Life (1847)—one of its essays, The Life Poetic, mainly a eulogy of Southey; and Notes from Books (1849), half made up of two articles on Wordsworth. Last came his interesting Autobiography (2 vols. 1885), admirably written, full of genial observation, and not marred at all by the pardonable egotism of age and merit. It contains a fine series of pen-portraits of such contemporaries as Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, Sydney Smith, Mill, Sir James Stephen, Spedding, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Aubrey de Vere. It was supplemented by his only less delightful Correspondence (1888), a selection of 202 letters, edited by Professor Dowden, including also letters to Taylor, from Wordsworth, Southey, Stephen, Mrs Norton, Macaulay, Spedding, Tennyson, Aubrey de Vere, Gladstone, Dr John Brown, and Swinburne. A uniform collected edition of his works had appeared in 5 vols. in 1878.