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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 This letter he accompanied with two poems attributed to Dryden, and till then unpublished.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
That I had never tasted letters,
Then no Parnassian maggots, bred
Like fancies in a madman's head,
No graspings at an idle name,
No childish hope of future fame,
No impotence of wit, had ta'en
Possession of my muse-struck brain.
Or had my birth with fortune fit,
Varnish'd the dunce, or made the wit,
I had not held a shameful place,
Nor letters paid me with disgrace.
Oh for a pittance of my own,
That I might live unsought, unknown,
Retired from all the pedant strife,
Far from the cares of bustling life;

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,
Continual plagues my soul molest,
And Magazines disturb my rest;
While scarce a night I steal to bed
Without a couplet in my head;
And in the morning, when I stir,
Pop comes a Devil," Copy, sir!"
I cannot strive with daring flight
To reach the brave Parnassian height,

25 Vol. i. p. 90.

But at its foot content to stray,
In easy unambitious way,

Pick up those flowers the Muses send,
To make a nosegay for my friend.
In short, I lay no idle claim
To genius strong and noisy fame;
But with a hope and wish to please,
I write, as I would live, with ease.

FRIEND.

But you must have a fund, a mine,
Prose, poems, letters,—

AUTHOR.

Not a line!

And here, my friend, I rest secure,
He can't lose much who's always poor.
And if as now, through numbers five,
This work with pleasure kept alive,
Can still its currency afford,
Nor fear the breaking of its hoard,
Can pay you, as at sundry times,

For self, per Mag, two thousand rhymes,
From whence should apprehension grow,
That self should fail with richer Co ?26

No doer of a monthly grub,
Myself alone a learned club,
I ask my readers to no treat,
Of scientific hash'd up meat,
Nor seek to please theatric friends

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:
Behold in monthly drudgery misemployed,

The wit and classic elegance of Lloyd,
How shall the bard bring fancy, doom'd to eke
With sense or nonsense through five sheets the week:
How shall he wait for those auspicious hours,
When the Muse beckons to Parnassian bowers,

And, as erewhile, informs the happy strain
With all the native ease of Flaccus' vein ?

The merciless exactors, on demand,
Instant as those who Israel's servile band

For me, once fond of author-fame,
Now forced to bear its weight and shame,
I have no time to run a race;
A traveller's my only pace.

They whom their steeds unjaded bear
About Hyde Park, to take the air,
May frisk and prance, and ride their fill,
And go all paces, which they will.
We hackney tits,-nay, never smile,
Who trot our stage of thirty mile,
Must travel in a constant plan,

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,
Till on his journeys up and down,

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,
Take off his appetite for travel.

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;
The poet's fancy, like their porter's back,

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.

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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.
Though for awhile with easy air
She smooths the rugged brow of care,
And laps the mind in flowery dreams,
With fancy's transitory gleams;
Fond of the nothings she bestows,
We wake at last to real woes.
Through every age, in every place,
Consider well the poet's case;
By turns protected and caress'd,
Defamed, dependent, and distress'd.
The joke of wits, the bane of slaves,
The curse of fools, the butt of knaves;
Too proud to stoop for servile ends,
To lacquey rogues, or flatter friends;
With prodigality to give,

Too careless of the means to live;
The bubble fame intent to gain,
And yet too lazy to maintain;
He quits the world he never prized,
Pitied by few, by more despised,
And lost to friends, oppress'd by foes,
Sinks to the nothing whence he rose.

O glorious trade! for wit's a trade,
Where men are ruined more than made !

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:
They mention him as if to use his name
Was in some measure to partake his fame,
Though Virgil, was he living, in the street
Might rot for them, or perish in the Fleet.
See how they redden, and the charge disclaim!
Virgil, and in the Fleet! forbid it shame!—
Hence, ye vain boasters, to the Fleet repair,
And ask,—with blushes ask,—if Lloyd is there!
Independence, 369---80.

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