Dr.Sayers we used to visit, and the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor; but our chief delight was in the society of Mrs.John Taylor, a most intelligent and excellent woman, mild and unassuming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large family, occupied with her needle and domestic occupations, but always assisting, by her great knowledge, the advancement of kind and dignified sentiment and conduct.
We note here the reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment.

In her _Autobiography_, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's _Memoir of William Taylor_, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father's.

She admits, indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose 'exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city,' and she continues: His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father's brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man's comfort in his infirmities.

When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel ...

we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner-table.
Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor's virtues or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the mark.