'Vulgar Wordsworth,' quoth he, 'the meanest object of the holy group,
Whose verse of all but childish prattle void,
Seems blessed harmony to Lambe and Lloyd.'

Lambe (whose name should have no 'e' at the end) and Lloyd, he adds in a footnote, are 'the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co.' Fancy a Byron sneering at Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb! These, at least, are equal, if not superior, to himself, even if Lloyd is confessedly beneath him in merit. However, I can, fortunately, give my readers a specimen of one of Lloyd's sonnets, admired and preserved by Bernard Barton. It is addressed to God on behalf of his own father, the Birmingham philanthropist:

'Oh Thou who, when Thou mad'st the heart of man,
Implanted'st there, as paramount to all,
Immortal conscience; do Thou deign to scan
With favouring eye these lays which would recall
Man to his due allegiance. Nothing can
Thrive without Thee; hence at Thy throne I fall
And Thee implore to go forth in the van
Of these my numbers, Lord of great and small!
Bless Thou these lays, and, with a reverent voice,
Next to Thyself would I my father place
Close at Thy threshold; true to his youth's choice
His deeds with conscience ever have kept pace;
Great Father, bid my "earthly sire" rejoice,
A white-robed Christian in Thy safe embrace.'

Bernard Barton calls it a 'noble sonnet.'

But the end was nearing. The fits and morbid impressions were followed by illusory voices and cries, and at last Wilson writes his wife: 'Poor Lloyd is in a madhouse.' He seems to have been for awhile in the well-known 'Retreat' at York, from whence he escaped, and was ultimately removed to an asylum in France, where, after some years, he died. In happier days he had married a Miss Pemberton, who is said to have been carried off by Southey on his friend's behalf. She was a capable and appreciated housewife, but her sanity did not prevent the transmission of her husband's disease to his son, the Rev. Owen Lloyd, a highly respected clergyman, with his father's poetic tastes and genius, and a close friend of 'lile' Hartley Coleridge.

Such, in brief, is the story, interesting yet melancholy, of one whose high character and culture and rare social qualities endeared him to a wide circle of men in the first literary ranks, and who was cordially esteemed by another and outer circle, in which was Leigh Hunt, who writes of him as 'a Latinist—much shaken by illness, but of an acute mind, and metaphysical.'

CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE.

From a rare Painting. By permission of J. M. Dent, Esq.

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