MASTERS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
(Continued from Page 1, 2d column.) 
the god of wisdom and eloquence.” 
From college, Taylor went to 
London, and was appointed lecturer 
at St. Paul’s. His biographer speaks 
at this time of his “florid beauty,” 
his “sweet and pleasant air,’ and 
his “sublime and raised discourses,” 
which made his hearers “take him 
for some young angel, newly de- 
scended from the visions of glory.” 
Such laudation seems fulsome and 
excessive, but it is quite according 
to the taste and spirit of the times. 
In 1642, Taylor was made Doctor of 
Divinity, and even at this early age, 
his mind was a wonderful _ store- 
house of knowledge, his fancy was 
discursive and brilliant, and _ his 
powers of imagination of the high- 
est order. Preferment after prefer- 
ment was heaped upon him. It is 
difficult to say what his life and 
work would have been, had he con- 
tinued to breathe the atmosphere of 
the court and to bask in the royal 
favor. For dark days came, and in 
the troubled scenes during the wars 
of the Cavaliers and Roundheads, 
the downfall of the Stuart dynasty 
and the times of the Protectorate, 
Taylor with many others of the 
clergy, was forced into practical 
exile; deprived of his living and 
home, he retired to Wales, where 
he supported himself for a time by 
teaching. During the confusion and 
turmoil of this period, the gentle 
scholar and preacher, ill-fitted to 
brave the tempests that hurtled 
around him, was lost to sight by the 
world of society and fashion. But 
it was in this enforced solitude, that 
he wrote the. works that have en- 
shrined his name among the great 
masters of English literature. “Cast 
ashore in a private corner of the 
world, a tender Providence shroud- 
ed him under her wings, and the 
prophet was fed in the wilderness.” 
He found a home in the family of 
Lord Carbery at Golden Grove, and 
passed the years in pleasant and 
fruitful study and labor. At the 
Restoration, in 1662, ‘Taylor was 
made Bishop of Down and Connor, 
and Vice-Chancellor of the Univer- 
sity of Dublin. After a life of strange 
vicissitudes and contrasts, in which 
notwithstanding his devotion to the 
royal party he seems never to have 
made an enemy, such was the saint- 
liness of his character, this good and 
great man died in the 54th year of 
his age, while Bunyon was in Bed- 
ford jail, writing his immortal 
allegory. 
Taylor’s works, as edited by 
Bishop Heber, fill fifteen octavo 
volumes. His best known works 
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are his Sermons, his Discourse on 
the Liberty of Prophesying, ‘and his 
Holy Living and Dying. It may be 
said of his writings that they are 
marred by strange conceits, a 
wilderness of fancy and an exuber- 
ance of rhetoric, and abound in what 
often seems a pedantic display of 
learning. But these are faults not 
of the man only but of the age, and 
they are offset by many and solid 
excellencies. So sober and judicial 
a critic as Hallam, after severely 
criticising the extravagances of 
Taylor’s style, speaks of him as 
“still the greatest ornament of the 
English pulpit up to the end of the 
seventeenth century.” Such quali- 
ties as seldom meet in one man were 
combined in this scholar and 
divine. He soared in ether with a 
load of learning which would have 
kept another grovelling. It is hard 
to point out a branch of study or 
scientific pursuit known to the 
seventeenth century, or any author 
of eminence ancient or modern, that 
has not received some allusion in 
his pages. His mind was at once 
robust and delicate, gifted and de- 
vout. It has been said that “his 
conceptions and his expressions be- 
long to the loftiest and most sacred 
description of poetry, of which they 
only want what they cannot be said 
to need, the name and the metrical 
arrangement.” With all its splendor 
of diction, there is in Taylor’s stylea 
gravity and seriousness as of a mind 
accustomed to deep communings, 
to high meditations, to “thoughts 
that wander through Eternity.” 
Taylor has been called from the 
richness of his imagination “the 
Shakespeare of theology.” Though 
the subjects of his writings are al- 
Ways grave, they are invested with 
such beauty of thought and ex- 
pression that they allure and fasci- 
nate at the same time that they im- 
press and instruct. His style is 
sometimes cumbrous and artificial ; 
his periods roll like a_ splendid 
chariot; but even his Latinisms and 
archaisins give a certain quaintness 
and charm to his matchless speech. 
It is not to be expected that Taylor 
will be much read at the present 
day, except by those who wish to 
know wherein the strength and 
majesty and beauty of our English 
language lie; but his name is a 
precious heritage to our English- 
speaking race, and to all for whom 
good learning and grace of ex- 
pression have a charm. 
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