hly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of
"The Lass of Fair Wone."

Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his
translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly
Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England.
When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia,
and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe
at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England.
"When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin,
"there was probably no English translation of any German author but
through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the
first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Buerger
in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora"
he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan
der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30
he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them
together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was
rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the
_Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say
eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought;
his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in
unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by
the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant
talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and
interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be
gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German
poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]

The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German
romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius
as Walter Scott should have made his _debut_ in an exhibition of the
horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood,
as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow
and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently
exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones."
Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell,
surgeon, where the desired articles w