In 1831 Robert Southey took under his patronage the poems
of John Jones, an old family butler. There was not much to be said for the verses themselves, and it was Sotithey's kindliness that made him see merit in them. But Southey bolstered them up with an excellent and erudite introduction upon Uneducated Poets. The accounts of Taylor, the Waterman ; Stephen Duck, the Thresher ; James Woodhouse, the Cobbler ; and Ann Yearsley, the Milk-woman, have never been bettered. All of them had some store of poetic ability, but John Taylor is by far 'the most important. He earned his living by ferrying people across the Thames ; but he was an Elizabethan and adventurous by nature, and he gained money by setting out on dangerous voyages for a wager : as when he rowed down the Thames in a paper boat with two stock-fish tied to canes for oars: He was a prolific writer of news-pamphlets in verse ; and here and there in his works we come across very fresh and attractive descriptions of nature. Southey's book is now re- printed by Mr. Humphrey Milford.
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