Poet and scholar. Sayers was born in London but after his father died when Sayers was a child, he spent his early years mainly in Suffolk and Norfolk. Sayers inherited a small estate from his grandfather in 1778 and qualified as a doctor in the Netherlands but decided to concentrate on literature from 1789 onwards. He settled in Norwich and became a central figure in the city’s intellectual life – William Taylor was an old schoolfriend. The themes and metres of Sayers’s early work, which began with his Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology (1790), influenced Southey’s own work profoundly. Sayers’s later publications were mainly in the fields of archaeology, philology and history. William Taylor published a collected edition of Sayers’s works in 1823, which Southey reviewed admiringly in the Quarterly Review in 1827.