if properly attended to. Though we cannot all of us be writers, we may yet contribute greatly to the success as well as merit of your undertaking, by communicating such originals as must secure attention from the very name of their authors. Many such are undoubtedly preserved in the private cabinets of the curious, and in the public libraries and repositories." This letter he accompanied with two poems attributed to Dryden, and till then unpublished. Already Lloyd began to feel the thraldom to which he had bound himself. Even in the second number these melancholy lines are found: Oh! had it pleased my wiser betters Far from the wits, the fools, the great, And all the little world I hate 25! When the far greater part of poor Lloyd's poems shall be forgotten, as they may be without injury to his memory or to literature, the passages in which he describes his own drudgery ought always to be preserved for a warning. While duly each revolving moon, Which often comes-God knows, too soon, 25 Vol. i. p. 90. But at its foot content to stray, Pick up those flowers the Muses send, FRIEND. But you must have a fund, a mine, AUTHOR. Not a line! And here, my friend, I rest secure, For self, per Mag, two thousand rhymes, No doer of a monthly grub, With scraps of plays and odds and ends27. Yet after this false demonstration of cheerfulness, the same poem contains a confession that he felt both the weight and the degradation 28 of his task: 26 It seems from hence that he had some stated assistance at this time; but nothing appears to show it. 27 Vol. i. pp. 375-6. 28 His friends felt this for him; one of them says: The wit and classic elegance of Lloyd, And, as erewhile, informs the happy strain The merciless exactors, on demand, For me, once fond of author-fame, They whom their steeds unjaded bear And run our journey as we can 29. The same obvious metaphor was continued in another piece, when he, poor man, had nearly reached the end of his stage: At first the poet idly strays Along the greensward path of praise, To see and to be seen in town, What with ill-natured flings and rubs From flippant bucks and hackney scrubs, His toils through dust, through dirt, through gravel, These lines were written after he had ceased to conduct the Magazine, and were addressed to Dr. Kenrick, who succeeded him as editor. During eighteen months he had continued to fulfil his monthly task, though at length in such exhaustion of means and spirits, that he seems to have admitted any communication, however worthless, or reprehensible in a worse way. But his whole dependance had been upon this adventure. The first paper with which Thornton had supplied him was one composed upon the thought that the greater part of mankind, if they had as many lives (according to the common saying) as a cat, would wantonly throw away the eight, how Plied with Egyptian toils, no pity show; Or smooth or turbid, still the verse must flow; They think is ever ready for the pack. They never felt persuasive fancy's beam Dart on the raptured mind the enlivening gleam; In vain the absence of the Muse you plead, The quota must be furnished as decreed; Thus jaded genius writes what it must blush to read. Lloyd printed these lines in his Magazine, only leaving a blank in the place of his own name. Vol. ii. p. 197. 29 P. 381. ever careful some of them might be to preserve the last. Pursuing this fancy through various examples, he presented one which, if it excited no forebodings in Lloyd upon its first perusal, must have been recollected by him in bitterness at last. 66 Suppose again (for there can be no end of such like suppositions) that I am an author; my works, indeed, I flatter myself, will live after me; but though I had all the lives of a cat, through each of them I might lead the life of a dog. My garret (we will say) has inspired me to soar so high as to attempt a sublime ode, or epic poem. I am let down by its want of sale: the beam across my chamber is very inviting, and at least the bed cords are remaining. I am afterwards lowered to humble prose: my publisher will not afford me small beer; and I choose to have my fill of water by a plunge into the river Thames. After sinking and rising, we will suppose, for eight times alternately, I at last sit down contented in a jail, to supply copy, scrap by scrap, as the printer's little imp calls for it; since, as the proverb has it, he must needs go when the devil drives 30' 3099 In the condition here described as the last stage of a hackney writer, Lloyd found himself after his failure with the Magazine; he was arrested for debts contracted during its progress, and it must be presumed either that they were beyond his father's ability to discharge, or that his imprudent habits were deemed incorrigible, or that it was hoped he might be brought by confinement to a better mind; for Dr. Lloyd, who had so benevolently interposed to save Churchill from imprisonment, did not procure his son's enlargement, and he has never been charged with want of parental feeling on that score. And now Churchill's friendship was shown. On his return from a summer excursion in Wales with his mistress, whom he now considered as a left-handed wife, united to him by moral ties, he hastened to the Fleet prison, provided for his immediate wants, supplied him with a guinea a week, as well as a servant; and endeavoured to raise a subscription for the purpose of extricating him from his embarrassments. Lloyd was not wanting to himself; he continued to drudge as before; completed, with Denis's assistance, a translation of Marmontel's Contes Moraux, which had been commenced in the Magazine, and performed any miserable work on which the book 30 St. James's Mag. vol. i. p. 140. 66 sellers would employ him. Whatever his reflections might be, he expressed no sorrow for the folly he had committed in throwing himself upon the world as an author: confinement was irksome enough," he said, "but not so bad as being usher at Westminster." Yet this strain shows that he had his bitter thoughts: The harlot muse so passing gay Bewitches only to betray. Too careless of the means to live; O glorious trade! for wit's a trade, Let crazy Lee, neglected Gay, The shabby Otway, Dryden gray, Those tuneful servants of the Nine, (Not that I blend their names with mine,) 31 Churchill connected it with a far greater than any of these : twenty fools of note Start up, and from report Mecænas quote: |