Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that: The great days of the Gurneys were not come yet.

The remarkable family from which issued Mrs.Fry and Joseph John Gurney were then a set of dashing young people, dressed in gay riding habits and scarlet boots, and riding about the country to balls and gaieties of all sorts.
As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs.Fry was the mother of fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had been twice a widower.

Both brother and sister were zealous philanthropists at this date.

And so we may take with some measure of qualification Harriet Martineau's many strictures upon Taylor's drinking habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew, then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his diocese.

Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that these charges of intemperance were 'grossly and unjustly exaggerated.' William Taylor's life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey.
Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs.
Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary career--had started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to romantic prose, from _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ to _Waverley_.