W. Taylor › Hymnals

Taylor, William, the son of a manufacturer, was born at Norwich, Nov. 7, 1765, and educated at Mr. Barbauld's school at Palgrave (see p. 113, ii.). After travelling abroad, he settled at Norwich in 1782. In 1791 he retired from business and devoted himself to literature. He was a frequent contributor to the Monthly, the Critical, and other Reviews, and was one of the first to introduce the study of German literature into England. His translations of Lessing's Nathan der Weise appeared in 1191, and of Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris in 1793. In 1813 he published English Synonyms Discriminated, and in 1828-30 his Historical Survey of German Poetry, 3 vols. He died March 5, 1836. A Memoir of the Life and Writings of William Taylor, by J. W. Robberds, in 2 vols., was published in London in 1843. Taylor was a member of the congregation of the Octagon Chapel, Norwich, and contributed the following 5 hymns to Dr. Enfield's Norwich Selection of Hymns for Social Worship, 1795 (p. 331, ii.):—
1. Father of peace, O turn once more. For Mercy.
2. God of the universe, Whose hand. God the Universal Benefactor.
3. Moons, planets, suns that swim the sky. Nature perishable, God eternal.
4. The Lord is just; He made the chain. The Just Man.
5. Well sleeps the good who sinks to rest.
These hymns were repeated without author's name in the Norwich hymn-book of 1814, and again, sometimes with and at other times without name, in later Unitarian collections. [Rev. Valentine D. Davis, B.A.]

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology, Appendix, Part II (1907)