Editing Holy Living and Holy Dying (section)

== Morality ==
''Holy Living'' is largely concerned with questions of practical [[morality]], of a type that has hardly changed from the 17th century to today. The companion volume, ''Holy Dying'', was occasioned by the death of the wife of Taylor's patron and employer, the [[Earl of Carbery]]. That book is half Christian instruction and half memorial [[sermon]], with Taylor displaying his gift for poetic prose. Coupled with the 17th century cult of [[melancholia]], the result is prose that is simultaneously stately and rapturous, "[[John Keats|half in love with easeful death]]", and reads like [[prose poetry]]:

:But so have I seen a Rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the Morning, and full with the dew of [[Heaven]], as a Lambs fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on a darknesse, and to decline its softnesse, and the symptomes of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night having lost some of its leaves, and all of its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. (See also [[period (rhetoric)]]).