Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry: Interspersed with Various Translations is a work published in 3 volumes, 1828-30. Vol. 1 is viii + 508 pp., with §6, "Analysis of Beowulf—an ancient epopæa," on pp. 78-91.

The chapter is a reframing and slight revision of Taylor's 1816 book review of Thorkelin's 1815 Latin translation. As Taylor explains in the volume's preface, “having metrically translated many lives of the poets for one periodic publication of this country … and criticized for another … many of the classical works of art, I have thought fit here to assemble, in systematic order, these scattered and successive contributions to an ‘Historic Survey of German Poetry.’ Introductory and connective sections have been composed, deficiencies filled up, and superfluities retrenched; so that, in fact, a new and entire work is offered to the public” (v–vi).

The material (nearly all of the chapter) that is taken from the 1816 review is slightly rearranged and revised, but mostly repeated verbatim. As previously, the retelling of the story alternates between prose summary ("canto" by "canto") and verse translation of select passages (79-88), with a few critical or expanatory interjections. The same eight passages are given in verse translation: lines 1-5, 18-25, 26-40a, 53-83a, 710-19, 783b-89, 2724-51, and 3179b-82. The summary with selected passages in verse translation is preceded and followed by commentary (pp. 78 and 89-90) which, as in 1816, remarks on the manuscript, speculates about who and where the peoples mentioned in the poem are, and suggests that the Beowulf poet is Wiglaf, who received much of his information directly from a historical Beowulf. The material taken from the 1816 review is preceded and followed by a brief introduction and coda meant to link it to the larger context of the book's historical overview of Germanic poetry.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), drew 2 excerpts from Taylor's treatment here (which Longfellow titled "Beowulf the Shyld" and "The Sailing of Beowulf") to use alongside 2 excerpts from Kemble's Beowulf and Longfellow's own single translated passage of Beowulf.

Taylor's mixed summary and translation begins:

The shaper, or bard, thus commences:

At the beginning
Who was the Dane's
King of the People;
Winner of glory,
Leading their nobles
The path of daring?
Shefing the Shyld.
Threat'ner of foes;
For many crews'
Dwellings he won.

In the eleventh line, mention occurs of an earl whose name is obliterated, but who is praised as a good king. In the thirtieth line occurs another anonymous monarch, whose name must have been Ægtheow; and these three princes seem to have been all the ancestors of Beowulf, whom the poet could enumerate. The Saxon chronicle, under the year 854, mentions a Shefing, there said to be born in the ark of Noah, which merely means that memory, or record, reaches no farther back; so that, both according to the Saxon chronicle, and to this poet, Shefing is, among the east Danes, the eldest son of fame. By east Danes, I presume, are meant those who settled in East-Anglia, the modern Norfolk and Suffolk; and it is remarkable that the Saxon chronicle gives us, among the descendants of this Shefing, one Beaw Scheldwaing, which is very like to Beowulf the Shyld.

After this short catalogue of fore-fathers, the poet thus introduces his hero:

Famous was Beowulf;
Wide sprang the blood,
Which the heir of the Shylds
Shed on the lands.
So shall the bracelets
Purchase endeavour,
Freely presented
As by thy fathers;
And all the young men,
As is their custom,
Cling round their leader
Soon as the war comes.
Lastly thy people
The deeds shall bepraise,
Which their men have performed. (78-80; italics as in original)

And ends:

Go look at the hoard
Below in the tower,
My beloved Wiglaf,
Now the circle of guards
Sit silently weeping,
That you may well know
What you are to find.
Go out of my sunshine.
When you are away,
I shall gladly abandon
The life and the kingdom
Allotted so long.

In the ensuing canto, Wiglaf inspects the treasury, and a long inventory is given of the plunder accumulated by Beowulf. On Wiglaf's return, he finds his father-in-law dying of his wound, and a moving farewell ensues. Cares of the funeral succeed; the barrow, or cairn, is heaped on Rone's Ness; and an encomium is chanted by a skald, which closes with these words:

His hearth-mates said,
Of the kings of the world
He was the mildest man,
The strongest of hand,
The dearest to the people,
The most eager for fame. (88)

GR 1768—whose primary object is a chapter (§6) of this 1828 book (Historic Survey of German Poetry: Interspersed with Various Translations, vol. 1) and not Taylor's 1816 review of Thorkelin's translation, from which most of the book chapter is taken—states that the chapter was "printed earlier in part" as the 1816 review, and Fry and MO1 characterize at as a reprint. This is substantially correct, but the material reused by Taylor here in 1828 does have minor changes of wording and some relocated sentences. MO2's representation of the relationship between the 1816 and 1828 texts, influenced by GR's "in part," is not literally incorrect, but could invite a mistaken inference that the 1816 review's translated passages themselves were expanded in 1828.

Fry and MO2 note the presence of translated passages but not the full summary. MO1 and GR note the presence of the summary but not the passages of verse translation.

Fry, MO1, GR, and MO2 all incorrectly attribute to Longfellow, when they appear in Longfellow's Poetry and Poets of Europe (1845), 2 verse translation passages by Taylor that Longfellow drew from this book and which had originally appeared in Taylor's 1816 review article. Longfellow's Table of Contents in that work does attribute both to Taylor.

BAM, from a copy issued as part of the completed 3-volume work in 1830 and dated 1830 on its title page. (The original publication date of 1828 for vol. 1 is attested by many bibliographic resources and WorldCat cataloguing.)