Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Feiling elegantly typified Taylor: ‘For such a man the eighteenth-century Church was the perfect milieu , wherein he could enjoy property in its most respectable form, and an assured income with a modicum of labour.’ 4 In his classic biography, Young Samuel Johnson , James L. Clifford had similarly estimated that, ‘the easy life of a church pluralist, appealed more than the active business of the law.’ 5 Following his father into practice as a country attorney, Taylor had turned, in common with his older contemporary William Warburton, into a country priest. The freshly ordained Taylor effectively bought his living from the Dixie family, continuing to reside apart in a neighbouring county in the house he had duly inherited from his father, calling in the brothers Adam to provide a new parlour and redesign his hall; they had been working locally at Kedleston Hall for the Curzon family, a house which Johnson found, after visiting Lord Scarsdale with Taylor in 1774, ‘costly but ill contained’. 6 Acting as chaplain to the duke of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth, the ‘violent Whig’ Taylor gradually secured modest preferment, including a prebend at Westminster, from which he went on to become rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster, the parliamentary church. 7 There his restless ambitions had to rest; he never gained the deaneries of Rochester or Lincoln, both of which he openly coveted. 8 Had Taylor spent less time breeding dogs and cattle and cultivating grain, and more on writing and publishing, he might have become a polemical divine and ended a bishop, as had Warburton, a major figure in England’s conservative, clerical Enlightenment, although the doctorate Taylor took at Oxford, in 1752, was in Law, not in Divinity. 9 Despite the early death of his first wife and being publicly humiliated when abandoned by his second, Taylor does seem to have achieved something that proved elusive to Johnson, happiness, the subject of the first of his posthumously published sermons. Preaching a wedding homily on Genesis 2.24, Taylor had confidently declared: 4 Feiling, In Christ Church Hall , p. 65. 5 James L. Clifford, Young Samuel Johnson (London, 1955), p. 214. 6 Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals , ed. E.L. McAdam, Donald Hyde, and Mary Hyde (New Haven, Conn., 1958), p. 170. 7 On his politics, see James Boswell, Life of Johnson , ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford, 1980), pp. 716, 840-41. He faithfully served three generations of the Cavendish family. 8 In addition to Feiling, see Thomas Taylor, A Life of John Taylor, LL.D., of Ashbourne, Rector of Bosworth, Prebendary of Westminster, and Friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson (London, 1910), and the admirable ODNB entry on Taylor by W.P. Courtney, revised by Michael Bevan. 9 On which form of Enlightenment experience, see J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (6 vols., Cambridge, 1999-2016), and B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: theological debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998).

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