Pulls you by Gravity up-Hill, ...
By your bad Deeds your Faith you shew,
’Tis but believe, and up You go (p. 36).
Lloyd treats the confusion between sexual desire and religious fervor as another aspect of general human depravity, extending the satire beyond the crude accusation of hypocrisy or cynicism. He argues that the confusion is a part of the human condition, allowed to go out of control by a religion that puts passion before reason. The Countess of Huntingdon, “cloy’d with carnal Bliss,” longs “to taste how Spirits kiss.” In his all-inclusive catalogue of “Knaves/ That crawl on Earth” Lloyd includes “Prudes that crowd to Pews,/ While their Thoughts ramble to the Stews” (p. 48).
What makes Lloyd interesting, in spite of his many derivative ideas and techniques, is inadvertently pointed out by the Critical Review, which complains that “the author outmethodizes even Methodism itself.”[5] That the brutal tone of The Methodist went beyond the license usually permitted the satirists was recognized by Lloyd himself. At the conclusion of the satire he asks God to halt the Methodist movement by getting to its source:
Quench the hot flame, O God, that Burns
And Piety to Phrenzy turns!
And then, after a few lines, he applies the same terms to himself:
But soft——my Muse! thy Breath recall——
Turn not Religion’s Milk to Gall!
Let not thy Zeal within thee nurse
A holy Rage! or pious Curse!
Far other is the heav’nly Plan,
Which the Redeemer gave to Man (pp. 52-53).
The satirist, as Robert C. Elliott points out, has always, in art, satirized himself.[6] But there is here as throughout this satire, some attempt to develop a style which will express the belief that the world will always be disorderly and that the disorder stems from man’s “Zeal within.” This condition of the world can be expressed satirically by a personal, informal satire which recognizes and dramatizes just how universal the corruption is and how commonplace its manifestations have become.
The informal, disorderly syntax, the colloquial diction, the chatty tone, the run-on lines, the conscious roughness of meter and rhyme, may have derived from Churchill, but they become here more relevant than in any of Churchill’s satires. They combine with the intemperate tone and the satirist’s concluding confession, his self-identification with the object of satire, to create a sense of an unheroic satirist, one who does not represent a highly commendable satiric alternative. Satire must now turn its vision from the heroic, the apocalyptic, the broadly philosophical, even from the depraved, and become exceedingly ordinary. It must recognize that there is little hope in going back to lofty Augustan ideals. For such subjects, it uses the impulsive tone of an over-emotional satirist who is as flawed as the subject he satirizes and still represents the best of a disordered world.
Lloyd had attempted an autobiographical satire in The Curate. He failed to create an important satire for a number of reasons, one of which was that he tried to present himself as a high ideal, a belief that he apparently held so weakly that the satire became merely petulant. Lloyd corrected this error in The Methodist and now seems, however briefly, to have opened the way to a truly prophetic style of satire.
After The Methodist Lloyd wrote Conversation, a satire that not only failed to fulfill the promise of The Methodist but is more conservative in theme and style than any of his earlier satires.