XI
A FRIEND OF GREAT POETS
CHARLES LLOYD
'Long, long, within my aching heart,
The grateful sense shall cherished be;
I'll think less meanly of myself,
That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.'
Charles Lamb.
MANY will, no doubt, ask who this man was, and where he lived? Such a question shows small acquaintance with either the biographies or writings of the great poets of the Lake School, or of Charles Lamb or Thomas De Quincey. He was the personal and highly-valued friend of them all, and his name and residence are too frequently mentioned in their letters and publications to escape the notice of even casual readers. He was the collaborateur of S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lamb in their first joint volume of poems, published by Joseph Cottle, bookseller, of Bristol, their kind patron in early days of struggle. He became a 'celebrity' of this district when he went to reside at Low Brathay, near Ambleside, fixing his home by the rushing rivulet of the Langdales, and beneath the lofty summit of Loughrigg, the mountain beloved of Fosters, and Arnolds, and their compeers and neighbours. He was born in 1775 at Birmingham, his father being a member of the Society of Friends, one of the wealthy banking firm, and a philanthropist and man of culture. He, the elder Lloyd, was a lover and translator of Homer and Horace, and specially a student of Greek literature, thereby helping to disprove the random assertion of a recent novelist that the Quakerism of the past generation was utterly antagonistic to the culture and spirit of old Greece.
When Charles was about of age, and had declined entering his father's bank, that he might give himself up to poesy, Coleridge visited Birmingham on the profitless errand of obtaining subscriptions to his magazine. He took a great liking to the new and rising author, and followed him to Bristol. Coleridge was very poor (Wedgewood's pension had not yet been granted), and was very shiftless to boot. Lloyd provided him with a free home and with access to sorely-needed books. When Coleridge removed to Nether Stowey, on the Quantock Hills, Lloyd went too, and again kept house. Here they were near Wordsworth, then residing at Alfoxden. One result of this acquaintance was the marriage of Lloyd's sister to a younger brother of the future Laureate. A strange, unpractical company these poets and philosophers were, and their ways were erratic. The story of their inability to put a collar on their pony till shown by a servant-girl, is well known. The landlord of Alfoxden refused to renew the letting of the house to Wordsworth because of his rumoured odd manners and habits. Here, at Nether Stowey, poor Lloyd appears first to have developed the epilepsy that, increasing in intensity, at last ended in madness. He was, no doubt in consequence of these fits, liable to extreme depression, and his morbidness, a source of anxiety and irritation to his friends, may have lain at the root of a quarrel between them, which the indispensable Cottle helped to settle, relating to their joint authorship, to which Lloyd had contributed the larger quantity of MSS. and the larger share of funds, if not the more excellent material.
As a poet and novelist he is now virtually forgotten. I can find no copies of his works in any public or subscription library in this locality, nor is there one of them in the invaluable London Library among all its hundreds of thousands of volumes. Yet those that exist are worth much money. In a second-hand dealer's catalogue I see there is a copy of the poems priced at no less than fifty shillings, at least ten times its original price. His novels I have failed altogether to find. 'Edmund Oliver' embodies the account, transferred to a fictitious hero, of Coleridge's disappointment in love while at Cambridge, an event which led to his enlisting in a cavalry regiment. It tells nothing but the truth when it humorously narrates the rough-riding experiences and the torture of the unhorsemanlike student-soldier, and pictures the astonishment of a cultured officer on discovering a Latin inscription on a stable wall, and on inquiry a trooper able to converse in Greek and ready to discuss at egregious length the most abstruse questions in philosophy. This episode alone makes the book interesting to collectors.
But though neither 'Edmund Oliver,' a novel in two volumes; nor 'The Duc d'Ormond,' a tragedy; nor 'Beritola,' a tale; nor even 'Desultory Thoughts in London,' are easy to find outside the British Museum Library, yet Lloyd clearly deserves a nearer approach to immortality than he has attained. De Quincey writes of him in his 'Literary Reminiscences': 'At Brathay lived Charles Lloyd. Far as he might be below the others I have mentioned, he could not be called a common man. Common! He was a man never to be forgotten! He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversation the most extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners and the most delicate nuances of social life.' He could not be a mere hanger-on to greater men to whom several poets addressed sonnets of affection and admiration. Charles Lamb, whose contributions to the early joint volume were few, while he speaks of Lloyd's as over a hundred, 'though only his choice fish,' is quite enthusiastic, exclaiming:
'Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why were't thou not born in my father's dwelling,
So we might talk of the old familiar faces?'
One, and the chief, labour undertaken by Lloyd at Brathay, after his marriage and permanent settlement there, was a voluminous translation of Alfieri's poetical works from the Italian. It is spoken of as faithful to the original and full of the truest poetic insight. In the judgment of competent critics his translations were better than his own compositions, even of those of his later years, such as his 'Nugæ Canoræ,' published about the same time as Professor Wilson's 'Isle of Palms,' of which, by-the-by he received a presentation copy as a token of regard from the author, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lamb in writing to Lloyd, gives him rather a back-handed testimonial when he says, 'Your verses are as good and wholesome as prose,' while in another letter he says, 'Your lines are not to be understood on one leg! They are sinuous and to be won with wrestling.' Probably the key to this remark is contained in Talfourd's statement that Lloyd wrote 'with a facility fatal to excellence.' On the other hand, the spitefully sarcastic and foolish sentences of Byron, uttered against Wordsworth and his 'school,' inclusive of the subject of this paper, seem almost beneath contempt: