After that work he produced little. He published an expanded version of The Power of the Pen and a dull ode printed in The Annual Register. When William Kenrick, in Love in the Suds, implied that Garrick was Isaac Bickerstaff’s lover, Lloyd defended Garrick in Epistle to David Garrick. Kenrick replied with A Whipping for the Welch Parson, an ironic Dunciad-Variorum-type editing of Lloyd’s Epistle, in which he got much the better of Lloyd. Lloyd was no match for Kenrick at this sort of thing. Except for these uninteresting productions and his convivial friendship with Wilkes and Garrick, we hear not much more of Lloyd.
We know so little about his life that we can only speculate why he failed to follow up the promise of The Methodist; why, after favorable reviews from the journals[7] and the flattering friendship of famous men, he was not encouraged to continue a career that was as promising as the early career of many famous satirists. The explanation may lie solely in his personality. Perhaps the moderate success he achieved and the financial rewards it brought were enough for him.
Another explanation is suggested by the conservative ideas and style of Conversation, which are more like Pope’s than are the ideas and style of any earlier satire of Lloyd’s. In this satire he explicitly repudiates his older, freer critical dicta in both theory and practice:
Tho’ this be Form—yet bend to Form we must,
Fools with it please, without it Wits disgust (p. 3).
He uses mostly end-stop couplets, parallel constructions, Augustan diction and similes. Apparently, he began his rejection of his new ideas and style immediately after The Methodist and before his 1766-1767 outburst of satire-writing was over.
Lloyd, in writing The Methodist, seems to have come as close as any satirist before Blake and the writers of The Anti-Jacobin to seeing the problems England and the world were headed toward, to recognizing how genuinely volatile English society was in the middle of the century, and to creating a style which could deal with those problems satirically. It may be that he got some realization that his own long passages in The Methodist praising this best of all possible worlds (pp. 16-20) and his invocation to the “heav’nly Plan” at the conclusion made no sense, that they were contradicted by other passages in the same satire, that England and the world were changing with enormous rapidity, and that the satirist would have to create a new style to express the tremendous economic, political, social, and religious problems that were coming into being. It may be that getting such a faint notion he withdrew into artistic conservatism, into conviviality, and into silence.
Temple University
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] For a survey of all Lloyd’s work see Cecil J. L. Price, A Man of Genius and a Welch Man (University of Swansea, Wales, 1963). Lloyd is the subject of an unpublished dissertation, The Moral Beau, by Paul E. Parnell (New York University, 1956). Two short passages from The Methodist are included in The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse, ed. Edward Lucie-Smith (Baltimore, 1967).