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 w