AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

HENRY TAYLOR.

CHAPTER I.

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.

WHEN a man's life is written it is expected that something should be said of his birth and parentage, however little there may be to say in which any one but himself and his family can take an interest.

I was born at Bishop-Middleham, in the county of Durham, on October 18, 1800. It would have been pleasant to me to have been high-born. Pleasantness to the imagination, however, seems to be in these days (perhaps in other days too) almost the only advantage of high birth taken in itself and by itself. For if by any accident it is stripped of the wealth and the rich or powerful connections with which it is commonly attended, it seems to do nothing for a man's worldly advancement, and often, indeed, to be lost sight of.

It would have been pleasant to me also to have inherited a pleasant-sounding name. To have a pleasant sound connected with one's life at every step of it is surely no contemptible addition to the pleasantness of life; and though changing an ugly-sounding name for a pleasant

sounding name is not to be approved, because fanciful changes of name, becoming frequent, might occasion public inconveniences, yet, if there were no such reason against it, I do not think it would be to be despised merely because the motive of it is connected with the fancy and the imagination and the love of pleasing sounds. It is now readily excused in the case of a man who changes his name for an estate, and it is then said that he had "good reasons for it;" meaning, apparently, that if he changes his name from mercenary motives there is no fault to be found with him; whereas, if he makes the change from motives connected with the imagination, he is more or less despicable.

My father, George Taylor (born June 6, 1772), was the son of George Taylor (born 1732), who inherited from his father, William Taylor (my great-grandfather), the estate of Swinhoe-Broomford, in the parish of Bamborough, in Northumberland. It was entailed, but when my grandfather's eldest son attained his majority the entail was broken. I am the sole surviving heir in the male line of my great-grandfather, and a plan of the estate is all of it that has come into my possession. From the plan I learn that it consisted of seven hundred and seventeen acres; and I infer that the status of my great-grandfather was that of an inconsiderable squire. From some Latin and other books in my library in which he had written his name, I infer that he was a not uneducated squire.* The only other thing I know of him is that one day, when following the hounds close at the heels of the husband of a lady who was said to be the most beautiful person in the

* In a copy of Florus, which must have belonged to a son, to the name "Wm. Taylor" is added "Vir-1744." Whether he meant that he was more of a man than his neighbors, or only that he had attained the age of manhood in the year 1744, I am unable to say.

county, the said husband's horse fell, and my great-grandfather unhappily riding over him and killing him was in due season married to his widow.

Of my forefathers, before the times of my great-grandfather, I know little or nothing; how long they had been proprietors of Swinhoe-Broomford or whence they came. I have heard that they came from the other side of the border, under some persecution in the time of John Knox, connected in some way with a marriage of one of them with a daughter of a Sir Andrew Hume of the Merse, the chief of a border clan. But these are merely confused recollections of what was told me when I was hardly old enough to receive distinct impressions. Mixed blood makes, in my opinion, the best breed; and I should not be sorry to surmise that some proportion of mine may be Scotch; but I think my family did not care much whence they came or from whom. Except once or twice, very early in my childhood, I do not remember to have heard it spoken of.

My grandfather, George Taylor, married (May 5, 1761) Hannah, the daughter of Thomas Forster of Lucker. All that I know about them is what I find in a letter of February, 1807, to Sir Walter Scott from Robert Surtees, the antiquary and historian of Durham, who, in giving an account of a search after Jacobite ballads, writes, "Much of the above, such as it is, I owe to a very intelligent neighbor, now a temporary resident in this county, who has a hereditary right to be a retailer of Jacobite poetry, for his maternal grandfather, Thomas Forster, Esq., of Lucker, a near relative of General Forster, was condemned in 1715, and escaped out of Newgate by an exchange of clothes with his wife, and afterwards recovered his estates;

*

* Sir G. Grey tells me this is a mistake, and that it was General Forster himself, and not his brother, who escaped by the exchange of clothes.

and Mr. Taylor's paternal ancestor was begot between the double walls of Chillingham Castle, where his father was secreted in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion. Mr. Taylor remembers that his own father, whose estate was at Swinhoe, in Northumberland, used to maintain an old man in the capacity of writing-master to the children, who had been engaged in 1745, and was supposed to have been a person of some rank and property. He used on particular occasions, when tipsy, to sing a Latin Jacobite song, which I am sorry Taylor does not remember a word of." General Forster took refuge in Italy, whence he sent to his mother a present of a fan, which has come down to me with a memorandum of its history attached to it.

With the estate of Swinhoe-Broomford my grandfather inherited a disputed title to an estate of greater value called Limeage, in Kent, and the lawsuit thereto appertaining, the expenses of which brought encumbrances upon Swinhoe-Broomford, and these encumbrances increased until the sale of the estate after it had come into my father's possession on the death of his eldest brother. The sale, which produced £23,400, did little more than pay off the encumbrances.*

Thus my grandfather, who died before I was born, had been latterly in embarrassed circumstances, and had left Swinhoe to live by himself in a lodging in the village of Rothbury; and from the silence maintained about him and his separation from his family, I imagine that there

* 'My father, writing to me on July 30, 1826, to announce the completion of the sale, added, "Thank God! The estate and the family have been encumbered for a century-to my knowledge for forty years-once more, thank God!" A Mr. Tewart was the purchaser. I have heard that a certain Mr. Henry Taylor has occupied it since. If so, he was not related to us.

must have been something amiss in his habits of life. His children, three sons and two daughters, went to live with his younger brother, John, who had no children of his own, and was supposed to be rather rich, having married a lady of good fortune, a daughter (if I recollect right) of a Sir George Wheler.

This John, my great-uncle, had a house in Durham. I recollect him well; for his latter years were passed in my father's house, as my father's early years had been in his. He was the leanest man I ever saw, small in the bone and rather tall, the spare shanks ending in gouty ankles, with a refined, bloodless, meagre countenance, in which selfsufficiency was in some degree tempered by self-respect. He was vain and supercilious, but there was an ease and repose in his deportment which gave him an air of distinction rather than pretension. I suppose he must have had some claims to be considered literary, for there was in my father's library, and there ought to be in mine (though I cannot find it), a quarto volume of poetry, by a Mr. Percival, dedicated to him; and those of my books in which his name is written are rather beyond the range of ordinary reading. The manners which prevailed when his were formed had made ceremony a second nature to him, and he treated us children with the same formal politeness as our elders; and his compliments gained in length and slowness from a distressing impediment in his speech. He was a man of some acuteness and ability (which were of no use to him); he was brought up to no profession, made no money, and allowed almost everything he had to melt away from him. Being childless himself, he gave his nephews to understand that there would be a good provision for them all at his death, and when it took place the provision proved very scanty indeed. In the meantime the three boys were sent to a grammar