individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the
Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made
his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was
written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the
common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the
best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and
Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the
effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and,
indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German."
Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most
popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in
the _Monthly 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 Bürger
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