written by Dr. Vincent, who succeeded Lloyd as under-master; who, like him, was for half a century connected with the school; and who now, in like manner, lives in the grateful memory of his surviving pupils.

Happy had it been for Robert Lloyd, if, with the playful wit, the cheerful disposition, and the amiable temper of his father, he had inherited his wisdom and his virtue. He distinguished himself at Cambridge by his talents, but not in a way to procure for himself any academical honours or advantages. One of the earliest of Cowper's existing poems is an Epistle addressed to him while he was an under-graduate, and written in his own manner,.. for that, at the age of one-and-twenty had already been formed. The verses are remarkable on another account, for the following extract contains the first intimation of the writer's morbid feelings, and his own apprehension, even then, of their consequences.

'Tis not that I design to rob

Thee of thy birth-right, gentle Bob,
For thou art born sole heir and single,
Of dear Mat Prior's easy jingle;

Nor that I mean, while thus I knit

My thread-bare sentiments together,

To show my genius or my wit,

When God and you know, I have neither;

Or such, as might be better shown

By letting poetry alone.

'Tis not with either of these views,

That I presume t' address the Muse:

But to divert a fierce banditti,

(Sworn foes to ev'ry thing that's witty!)
That, with a black, infernal train,
Make cruel inroads in my brain,
And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense:

The fierce banditti which I mean,

Are gloomy thoughts, led on by spleen.

Having taken his degree, and leaving a character in the university which would have been forgotten as well as charitably forgiven, if his after life had given proof of reformation, Lloyd returned to Westminster as an Usher. That such a situation was compatible with contentment and happiness, he knew from his father's example; that it was not incompatible with genius, he saw in Vincent Bourne. But though circumstances must have

seemed to point it out as his peculiar destination, he became impatient of its wearisome routine, and resigned it in disgust. Possibly his religious opinions were at that time unsettled, and on that account he may have abandoned all intention of entering into orders, and consequently renounced the hopes of preferment which otherwise in such a situation he might have entertained. But there is no intimation of this in his Apology; he speaks in that poem with bitterness of the intellectual drudgery, and assigns no other cause for throwing himself upon the world as a literary adventurer.

For me, it hurts me to the soul
To brook confinement or control;
Still to be pinion'd down to teach
The syntax and the parts of speech;
Or, what perhaps is drudgery worse,
The links and points and rules of verse;
To deal out authors by retail,
Like penny pots of Oxford ale:
Oh 'tis a service irksome more
Than tugging at the slavish oar!
Yet such his task, a dismal truth,
Who watches o'er the bent of youth,
And while, a paltry stipend earning,
He sows the richest seeds of learning,
And tills their minds with proper care,
And sees them their due produce bear,
No joys, alas! his toil beguile,
His own lies fallow all the while.
"Yet still he's on the road," you say,
"Of learning."-Why, perhaps he may,
But turns like horses in a mill,
Nor getting on, nor standing still;
For little way his learning reaches,

Who reads no more than what he teaches.

Poor Lloyd had some misgivings before he ventured upon the perilous profession of authorship. For when one of his friends advised him to try his fortune with the public, he replied in a manner which seemed to show a proper regard to prudential considerations, as well as a just estimate of his own talents.

You say I should get fame. I doubt it:
Perhaps I am as well without it;
For what's the worth of empty praise ?
What poet ever dined on bays?

And though the laurel, rarest wonder!
May screen us from the stroke of thunder,
This mind I ever was and am in,

It is no antidote to famine.

But though Lloyd never appears to have overrated himself, and knew that he was never likely to undertake, still less to execute, any thing of great pith and moment, he was tempted by the desire of that reputation which so many mistake for fame, and which those authors who have no worthier object than immediate profit or present applause, prefer to it. His earliest pieces appeared in the "Connoiseur," and the friendly editor did not let pass the fair opportunity of praising them. This was before he left Cambridge, and in one of his communications to that paper, he says, "You must know, sir, that in the language of our old dons, every young man is ruined who is not an arrant Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater. Yet it is remarkable, that though the servants of the muses meet with more than ordinary discouragement at this place, Cambridge has produced many celebrated poets; witness Spenser, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, &c.; not to mention some admired writers of the present times. I myself, sir, am grievously suspected of being better acquainted with Homer and Virgil than Euclid or Saunderson; and am universally agreed to be ruined, for having concerned myself with hexameter and pentameter more than diameter.” But Latin verses were as much in his vocation at Westminster as mathematics might be at Cambridge; and the love of classi

cal pursuits, instead of marring his fortune there, would have materially contributed to make it.

The success which Thornton and Colman had obtained, undoubtedly raised his hopes and increased his confidence. At that time they seemed to have no farther ambition than to become conspicuous among the wits of the age; and being conscious that he was not inferior to them in any of the qualifications which such ambition required, he was impatient to be ranked in the same class. It is not uninteresting, and possibly may not be useless, to trace the state of his mind progressively in his own poems; ephemeral as they were, they become valuable when they with perfect fidelity exhibit the feelings of a literary adventurer, who, with great talents, great industry, and many amiable qualities, fell an early victim to his own unhappy principles and conduct.

Within four years after he had declared his unwillingness to increase the number of scribblers in rhyme, he thus acknowledged the change which had taken place in his mind upon that subject:

Whether a blessing or a curse,
My rattle is the love of verse.
Some fancied parts and emulation,
Which still aspires to reputation,
Made infant fancy plume her flight,
And held the laurel full to sight.
For vanity, the poet's sin,
Had ta'en possession all within ;
And he whose brain is verse-possest,
Is in himself as highly blest
As he whose lines and circles vie
With heaven's direction of the sky.
Howe'er the river rolls its tides,
The cork upon the surface rides;
And on ink's ocean, lightly buoy'd,
The cork of vanity is Lloyd.

Let me, too, use the common claim,

And souse at once upon my name,

Which some have done, with greater stress,
Who know me and who love me less.

However ardent his aspirations for fame may have been at that time, he expressed in this poem no overweening expectations that the same path would lead with equal certainty to fortune.

However narrowly I look
In Phoebus's valorem book,

I cannot from inquiry find

Poets had much to leave behind.

They had a copyhold estate

In lands which they themselves create
A foolish title to a fountain,

A right of common in a mountain.

Colman, who had already produced a popular farce, and whose well known comedy of "The Jealous Wife" was then on the point of representation, had advised Lloyd to write a play:

That talent, George, though yet untried,
Perhaps my genius has denied,

was the answer which, in the same epistle, he gives to the advice. Perhaps no author ever distrusted his own powers without good reason. He may in execution fall far short of his hopes and anticipations, and such of his productions as have pleased him well in one mood of mind, may in another seem to him "stale, flat, and unprofitable;" for this depends more upon the state of the stomach and the pulse, than of the judgement: but he who at the commencement distrusts his ability for what he undertakes, must as surely fail, as the timid slider falls, or the swimmer sinks if he is panic-stricken in deep water.

Lloyd was a frequenter of the theatres, and had paid much attention to theatrical performances. He first made himself generally known, and with considerable reputation, by a poem called "The Actor," addressed to Thornton, and of sufficient length to form a quarto pamphlet. It was written with his characteristic ease, and more than his usual vigour; and the subject, though trite, was one in which what was then called "the Town" took an interest. The critical remarks upon the costume of the stage, and upon the appearance of Banquo's ghost, were more in the spirit of Kemble's age than of Garrick's; and he reprobated Foote with just and honest indignation for the libellous personalities with which his dramas were seasoned, admirable in their kind as those dramas would be, were it not for this moral sin. But though Lloyd was a good stage critic, he never judged more rightly than when he doubted his own talents for dramatic composition. By Gar