The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 5 (of 7) — John Shaqi
The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 5 (of 7)Malkin, Arthur Thomas
Religion
The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 5 (of 7)
Malkin, Arthur Thomas
Biography
His varied duties can now have left little time for the labour of the
pen; still he published sermons from time to time, and in 1664 completed
and published his last great work, a ‘Dissuasive from Popery,’
undertaken by desire of the collective body of Irish bishops. He
continued after his elevation to reside principally at Portmore,
occasionally at Lisburne. Of his habits, and the incidents of this
latter part of his life, we know next to nothing; except that he
suffered the severest affliction which could befal a man of his
sensibility and piety, in the successive deaths of his three surviving
sons, and the misconduct of two of them. One died at Lisburne, in March,
1661; one fell in a duel, his adversary also dying of his wounds; the
third became the favourite companion of the profligate Duke of
Buckingham, and died of a decline, August 2, 1667. Of the latter event
the Bishop can scarcely have heard, for he died on the 13th of the same
month, after ten days’ sickness. He was buried at Dromore. Two of his
daughters married in Ireland, into the families of Marsh and Harrison;
and several Irish families of repute claim to be connected with the
blood of this exemplary prelate by the female line.
The materials for Bishop Taylor’s life are very scanty. The earliest
sketch of it is to be found in the funeral sermon preached by his friend
and successor in the see of Dromore, Dr. Rust, who sums up the virtues
of the deceased in a peroration of highly-wrought panegyric, of which
the following just eulogy is a part—“He was a person of great humility;
and notwithstanding his stupendous parts, and learning, and eminency of
place, he had nothing in him of pride and humour, but was courteous and
affable, and of easy access, and would lend a ready ear to the
complaints, yea, to the impertinence of the meanest persons. His
humility was coupled with an extraordinary piety; and I believe he spent
the greatest part of his time in heaven.... To all his other virtues he
added a large and diffusive charity; and whoever compares his plentiful
income with the inconsiderable estate he left at his death, will be
easily convinced that charity was steward for a great proportion of his
revenue. But the hungry that he fed, and the naked that he clothed, and
the distressed that he supplied, and the fatherless that he provided
for, the poor children that he put to apprentice, and brought up at
school, and maintained at the university, will now sound a trumpet to
that charity which he dispensed with his right hand, but would not
suffer his left hand to have any knowledge of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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