The Methodist: A Poem

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.