Evan Lloyd’s works consist chiefly of four satires written in 1766 and 1767,[1] all of which are now little-known. What little notice he receives today results from his friendship with John Wilkes and David Garrick and from one satire, The Methodist, which is usually included in surveys of anti-Methodist literature.[2] For the most part, his obscurity is deserved. In The Methodist, however, he participates in a short-lived revolt against the tyranny of Augustan satire and shows considerable evidence of a talent that might have created a new style for formal verse satire.

The seventeen-sixties were a difficult period for satire. The struggle between Crown and Parliament, the new industrial and agricultural methods, the workers’ demands for higher pay, the new rural and urban poor, the growth of the Empire, the deteriorating relations with the American colonies, the increasing influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, the popularity of democratic ideas, the Wilkes controversy, the growth of Methodism, the growth of the novel, the interest in the gothic and the picturesque and in chinoiserie, sentimentality, enthusiasm—all these activities made England a highly volatile country. Some changes were truly dynamic, others just fads. But to someone living in the period, who dared to look around him, the complexity of the present and the uncertainty of the future must have seemed enormous.

To a satirist, such complexity makes art difficult. Satire usually deals with every-day realities, to which it applies simple moral ideals. The Augustan satiric alternative—returning to older beliefs in religion, government, philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. The Epilogue to the Satires becomes an epilogue to all Augustan satire and the conclusion of The New Dunciad declares the death of its own tradition. There is a sense now that England and the world have reached the point of no return. The satirist of the seventeen-sixties who repeats the ideas and styles of Butler, Dryden, Swift, Gay, and Pope seems not only imitative but out-of-touch with the world around him.

But such difficulties can provide the impetus for new forms and for original styles. And in the seventeen-sixties the writers of formal satire show signs of responding to the challenge. Christopher Anstey, Charles Churchill, Robert Lloyd, and Evan Lloyd seem, during this decade, to be developing their considerable facilities with satiric technique toward the creation of new styles. Anstey’s New Bath Guide has a combination of epistolary fiction, realism, use of naive observers, changing points of view, sweeping view of the social scene, great range of subjects, rolicking verse forms, and tone of detached amusement which suggests a satirist who, while still largely derivative, had the talent to create new techniques. Churchill and Robert Lloyd are explicit in their wish to break from Augustan style. Churchill argues that it was “a sin ’gainst Pleasure, to design / A plan, to methodize each thought, each line / Highly to finish.” He claims to write “When the mad fit comes on” and praises poetry written “Wild without art, and yet with pleasure wild” (Gotham [1764], II, 167-169, 172, 212). His satire—with its deliberate, irreverant, “Byronic” run-on lines, fanciful digressions, playful indifference to formal structure, impulsively involuted syntax, long, wandering sentences—seems to move, as does Robert Lloyd’s satire (at a somewhat slower pace), toward a genuinely new style. In being chatty, fluid, iconoclastic, spontaneous-sounding, self-revealing, his satire might eventually prove capable of dealing with the problems that the Augustan satirists had predicted but did not have to deal with so directly. But both Churchill and Robert Lloyd died before they could develop their styles to the point that they had a new, timely statement to make. Anstey failed to develop beyond the New Bath Guide, and his influence proved to be more important on the novel than on verse satire.

Evan Lloyd’s first satire, The Powers of the Pen, is a clever but ordinary satire on good and bad writing. It has some historical interest as an example of the early influence of Rousseau in England, of part of the attack on Samuel Johnson for his adverse criticism of Shakespeare, of the influence of Churchill (Lloyd declared himself a disciple), and of the expression of the fashionable interest in artlessness which was influenced as much by Joseph Warton as by Rousseau. In a “quill shop” the narrator discovers magic pens which write like various authors. The one whose “Mate was purchas’d by Rousseau” can:

Teach the Passions how to grow
With native Vigour; unconfined
By those vile Shackles, which the Mind
Wears in the School of Art....
Yet will no Heresies admit,
To gratify the Pride of Wit (p. 30).

He advances these critical dicta elsewhere in this satire, condemning Johnson because he tries “Nature” by “Critic-law” (p. 21). With fashionable Rousseauistic ideas he praises:

The Muse, who never lov’d the Town,
Ne’er flaunted in brocaded Gown;
Pleas’d thro’ the hawthorn’d Vale to roam,
Or sing her artless Strain at Home,
Bred in plain Nature’s simple Rules,
Far from the Foppery of Schools (p. 36).

Evan Lloyd, Robert Lloyd, and Churchill, starting from somewhat different philosophic principles, all arrive at similar positions.

The Curate, his second satire, is largely autobiographical. It shows, as does The Powers of the Pen, some clever turns of phrases, pithy expressions, and amusing images. It also contains incisive criticism of corruption in the Church, of declining respect for Christianity, and, what seems to Lloyd almost the same thing, of a collapsing class structure. The Church wardens, “uncivil and unbred! / Unlick’d, untaught, un-all-things—but unfed!” are “but sweepers of the pews, / The Scullions of the Church, they dare abuse, / And rudely treat their betters” (pp. 16-17). They show a lack of proper respect both for class-structure and Christianity:

Servant to Christ! and what is that to me?
I keep a servant too, as well as He (p. 17).

But The Curate frequently descends to a whine. The curate is morally above reproach while those above him are arrogant and those below him are disrespectful.

The most serious problem with The Curate, however, is the same as the problem with all of Lloyd’s satires except The Methodist, and the same as the problem with almost all satires between Pope and Burns or Blake. The satirist seems unwilling to probe, to find out what are the political, ethical, psychological, or aesthetic forces that cause the problems which the satirist condemns, and to recommend what can be done to change these forces. If the satirist notes any pattern at all, it is one of ineffective, unmoving abstraction and generality.

One explanation for this deliberate avoidance of more profound issues is not hard to find. An astonishing number of satires of this period contain a large proportion of lines devoted to describing how wonderful everything is. The widespread conviction that whatever is, in the England of the late eighteenth century, is right, may have resulted from the influence of An Essay on Man. Or the Essay may have been popular because it expressed ideas already in general acceptance. But whatever the explanation is, the catch-phrases extracted from Pope’s most popular work become the touchstones of post-Augustan satire.

The problem that the satirist faced in the sixties was, then, formidable. The country was in upheaval but the conventions demanded that the satirist say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd’s Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill’s Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various kinds of enthusiasm.

Methodism lent itself to such satire. Methodists could be described as unfortunate aberrants from an essentially good world, typical of those bothersome fanatics and deviants at the fringe of society who keep this world from being perfect. They were also logical heirs to the satire once visited upon Dissenters but which diminished when Dissenters became more restrained in their style of worship. (The Preface to one anti-Methodist satire even takes pains to exclude “rational Dissenters” from its target.) Many Methodists were followers of Calvin. These Methodists brought out the old antagonisms against the Calvinist doctrine of Election (or the popular version of it), directed against its severity, its apparent encouragement of pride, and its antinomian implications. The mass displays of emotion at Methodist meetings would be distasteful to many people in most periods and probably were especially so in an age in which rational behavior was particularly valued. And there were those people who believed that Methodism, in spite of Wesley’s arguments to the contrary, led good members of the Church of England astray and threatened religious stability.

Yet all these causes do not explain the harshness of anti-Methodist satire. No other subject during this period received such severe condemnation. Wesley and Whitefield were accused of seducing their female converts, of fleecing all their converts of money, of making trouble solely out of envy or pride. Evan Lloyd is not so harsh nor so implacably bigoted about any other subject as he is about Methodism. He was an intimate friend of John Wilkes, the least bigoted of men. Also, there are essential differences between the Dissenters of the Restoration and the Methodists of the late eighteenth century that would seem to lessen the antagonism toward the Methodists. To the satirists of the Restoration, Dissenters were reminders of civil war, regicide, the chaos that religious division could bring. Now the only threat of religious war or major civil disturbance had come from the Jacobites, and even that threat was safely in the past. It is notable that Swift, Pope, and Gay tended to satirize Dissenters within the context of larger problems. The assault on Methodists, then, is actually not a continuation of anti-Dissenter satire but something new. Hence the whole movement of anti-Methodist satire in the sixties and seventies has an untypically violent tone which cannot be explained solely in terms of satiric trends or religious attitudes. The explanation lies, I think, partly in the social, political, and economic background.

The Methodist movement was perhaps the most dramatic symptom (or at least the symptom hardest to ignore) of the changes taking place in England. The Methodist open-air services were needed because new industrial areas had sprung up where there were no churches, and lay preachers were necessary because of population shifts but also because of the increase in population made possible by new agricultural and manufacturing methods. The practice of taking lay preachers from many social classes had obvious democratic implications. Wesley, in spite of his political conservatism, challenged a number of widely-held, complacent aphorisms, such as the belief that people are “poor only because they are idle.”[3] The mass emotionalism of the evangelical meetings were reminders that man was not so rational as certain popular ideas tried to make him. Wesley’s insistence (with irritatingly good evidence) that he did no more than adhere to the true doctrine of the Church of England strongly suggested that the Church of England had strayed somewhere. (It is rather interestingly paralleled by Wilkes’s insistence that he only wanted to return to the Declaration of Rights, a reminder that the government had also strayed.) And Methodism, by its very existence and popularity, posed the question of whether the Church of England, in its traditional form, was capable of dealing with problems created by social and economic changes.

These social, economic, and political issues are touched upon by a number of the anti-Methodist satirists. Most of these satirists, however, are contented simply to complain about the lower class tone of the Methodist movement, to note generally, as Dryden and Swift had noted before, that Protestantism contained the seeds of mob rule. The anonymous author of The Saints fears “Their frantic pray’r [is] a mere Decoy for Mob” (p. 4) and the author[4] of The Methodist and Mimic claims that Whitefield’s preaching sends “the Brainless Mob a gadding” (p. 15). Evan Lloyd is the one anti-Methodist satirist who explores the larger implications.

Lloyd constructs his satire around the theme of general corruption, that nothing is so virtuous that it cannot be spoiled either by man’s weakness or by time. The theme is common in the period and could have become banal, except that Lloyd applies it to the corruption of the Church and its manifestations in daily life, giving it an immediate, lively reference. The Methodist practice of lay preachers, for example, Lloyd treats as an instance of the collapse of the class system:

Each vulgar Trade, each sweaty Brow
Is search’d....
Hence ev’ry Blockhead, Knave, and Dunce,
Start into Preachers all at once (p. 29).

Lloyd combines the language of theology, government, and civil order to suggest a connection between recent riots, the excesses of the Earl of Bute, the Protestant belief that religious concepts are easily understood by all social classes, democracy, the emotional displays of Methodism, and lay preachers:

Hence Ignorance of ev’ry size,
Of ev’ry shape Wit can devise,
Altho’ so dull it hardly knows, ...
When it is Day, or when ’tis Night,
Shall yet pretend to keep the Key
Of God’s dark Secrets, and display
His hidden Mysteries, as free
As if God’s privy Council He,
Shall to his Presence rush, and dare
To raise a pious Riot there (pp. 29-30).

Lloyd presents an essentially disorderly world in which chaos spreads almost inevitably, in which riots, corrupt ministers, arrogant fools, disrespectful lower classes, giddy middle classes, and lascivious upper classes are barely kept in check by a system of social class, government, and church. Now, with the checks withdrawn, lawyers and physicians spread their own disorder even further as they:

Quit their beloved wrangling Hall,
More loudly in a Church to bawl: ...
And full as fervent, on their Knees,
For Heav’n they pray, as once for Fees; ...
The Physic-Tribe their Art resign,
And lose the Quack in the Divine; ...
Of a New-birth they prate, and prate
While Midwifry is out of Date (pp. 30-31).

He combines the language of tradesmen with the language of mythology and theology to suggest, rather wittily and effectively, that disorder can be commonplace and cosmic simultaneously:

The Bricklay’r throws his Trowel by,
And now builds Mansions in the Sky; ...
The Waterman forgets his Wherry,
And opens a celestial Ferry; ...
The Fishermen no longer set
For Fish the Meshes of their Net,
But catch, like Peter, Men of Sin,
For catching is to take them in (pp. 32-34).

This spreading confusion is, however, not just a passing social problem but one that results from many breasts being “tainted” and many hearts “infected” (p. 34). The corruption is almost universal and results in Wesley (as he actually did) selling “Powders, Draughts, and Pills.” Madan “the springs of Health unlocks,/ And by his Preaching cures the P[ox],” (he was Chaplain of Lock Hospital) and Romaine:

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.

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