he tries "Nature" by "_Critic-law_" (p. 21). With
fashionable Rousseauistic ideas he praises:

The _Muse_, who never lov'd the Town,
Ne'er flaunted in brocaded Gown;
Pleas'd thro' the hawthorn'd Vale to roam,
Or sing her artless Strain at Home,
Bred in plain Nature's simple Rules,
Far from the Foppery of Schools (p. 36).

Evan Lloyd, Robert Lloyd, and Churchill, starting from somewhat different
philosophic principles, all arrive at similar positions.

_The Curate_, his second satire, is largely autobiographical. It shows,
as does _The Powers of the Pen_, some clever turns of phrases, pithy
expressions, and amusing images. It also contains incisive criticism of
corruption in the Church, of declining respect for Christianity, and,
what seems to Lloyd almost the same thing, of a collapsing class
structure. The Church wardens, "uncivil and unbred! / Unlick'd, untaught,
un-all-things--but unfed!" are "but sweepers of the pews, / The
_Scullions of the Church_, they dare abuse, / And rudely treat their
betters" (pp. 16-17). They show a lack of proper respect both for
class-structure and Christianity:

_Servant to Christ!_ and what is that to me?
I keep a servant too, as well as He (p. 17).

But _The Curate_ frequently descends to a whine. The curate is morally
above reproach while those above him are arrogant and those below him are
disrespectful.

The most serious problem with _The Curate_, however, is the same as the
problem with all of Lloyd's satires except _The Methodist_, and the same
as the problem with almost all satires between Pope and Burns or Blake.
The satirist seems unwilling to probe, to find out what are the
political, ethical, psychological, or aesthetic forces that cause the
problems which the satirist condemns, and to recommend what can be done
to change these forces. If the satirist notes any pattern at all, it is
one of ineffective, unmoving abstraction and generality.

One explanation for this deliberate avoidance of more profound issues
is not hard to find. An astonishing number of satires of this period
contain a large proportion of lines devoted to describing how wonderful
everything is. The widespread conviction that whatever is, in the England
of the late eighteenth century, is right, may have resulted from the
influence of _An Essay on Man_. Or the _Essay_ may have been popular
because it expressed ideas already in general acceptance. But whatever
the explan