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Houghton Library, MS Hyde 76 1.185.7. Previously published: J. W. Robberds (ed.), A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols (London, 1843), I, pp. 452-456.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I was thinking over the Iris & whether or
no I was not bound in conscience to the effort of a letter
upon the subject when yours arrived & turned the
scale.for then
the murder is out, & now I will say what for a long
while I have thought, that you have ruined your style by
germanisms, latinisms & Greekisms: that you are sick of
a surfeit of knowledge – that your learning breaks out like
scabs & blotches upon a beautiful face. I am led by
indolence & by good nature always rather to feel dislike
than to express it. & if another finds the same fault
that has displeased me in your writings, have always
defended them more zealously than if they had been my own.
but faults they are, faults anywhere, & tenfold
aggravated in a newspaper. how are plain Norfolk farmers –
& such will read the Iris to understand words which they
have never heard before & which are so foreign as not to
be even in Johnsonsthe English language his
mother tongue.
Had I been at Norwich I would have besought
you not to undertake an office so inadequate & so
unsuited to your powers. you are incurring all the
disadvantages of that public authorship which till now you
had wisely avoided. Every body knows that William Taylor
edites the Iris. Even here I have heard it. but is William
Taylor to learn that detraction is the resource & the
consolation of inferiority – that every one of his
acquaintance who feel themselves inferior will gladly
flatter themselves by dwelling upon & magnifying every
error or resemblance of an error that he may commit? the
world always expect more than they can find, & to this
evil you are peculiarly subject because you have hitherto
kept yourself back. I doubt whether precipitancy be so
dangerous as such witholding. What ought not to be expected
from him who kept the Lenora
But you are in so far – that good luck be with ye! is the best thing I can now say.
The metaphysical work
The Sonnets you speak ofthem
by the subject, & by the omission of common faults, instead of <rather
than> the appearance of peculiar merit. In April I have
some prospect of visiting London for the purpose of getting
at certain books in the Museum.fat poisonous to genius &
virtue in their best sense, as to the flower of the valley,
or the oak of the forest. men of talent may & will be
gregarious. men of genius will not. handicraft-men work
together, but discoveries must be the work of individuals.
neither are men to be studied in cities – except indeed, as
students walk the hospitals you go to see all the
modifications of disease.
Rickman is not
gone to Paris, nor going. he will be my host in London. –
your paper upon Berkeley
Our love to Harry.