My Mother has often told me how amiable Mr. Lloyd was as a youth; how kind to her little Hartley; how well content with cottage accommodation; how painfully sensitive in all that related to the affections. I remember him myself, as he was in middle life, when he and his excellent wife were most friendly to my brothers, who were school-fellows with their sons. I did not at that time fully appreciate Mr. Lloyd's intellectual character, but was deeply impressed by the exceeding refinement and sensibility marked in his countenance and manners,--(for he was a gentleman of the old school without its formality,)--by the fluent elegance of his discourse, and, above all, by the eloquent pathos, with which he described his painful mental experiences and wild waking dreams, caused by a deranged state of the nervous system. _Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu'il nous prodigue_. Nervous derangement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility. Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges, it is the accompanying drawback; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man's malady.
"The Duke D'Ormond", which was written 24 years before its publication in 1822, that is in 1798, soon after Mr, Lloyd's residence at Stowey, has great merit as a dramatic poem, in the delineation of character and states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural; not only that, but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective; and we feel the actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is tragic effect in the scenes of the 'denouement'. I understand what it was in Mr. Lloyd's mind which Mr. De Quincey calls 'Rousseauish'. He dwelt a good deal on the temptations to which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become, from circumstances, sins if indulged, and the source of sin and misery; but the effect of this piece is altogether favourable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious conviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an 'anatomy' of passion, not a 'picture' of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rousseau present, a picture fitted to excite 'feelings' of baneful effect upon the mind, rather than to awaken 'thought', which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man would have sought my Father's daily society who was not predominantly given to reflection. What is very striking in this play is the character of the heroine, whose earnest and scrupulous devotion to her mother occasions the partial estrangement of her lover, d'Ormond, and, in its consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her reason and causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of those guilty persons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but are not all "enslaved, nor wholly vile." Strong is the contrast which this play presents, in its exhibition of the female character, with that of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated similar subjects. Men write,--I have heard a painter say, men even paint,--as they feel and as they are. Goethe's Margaret has been thought equal to Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona; in some respects it is so; but it is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some tainting matter has fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe's genius and sensibility would have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though frail on one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being induced to give her poor old mother a sleeping potion. "It will do her no harm." But the risk!--affection gives the wisdom of the serpent where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove. A true Englishman would have felt that such an act, so bold and undaughterly, blighted at once the lily flower, making it "put on darkness" and "fall into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces." In Mr. Lloyd's youthful drama even the dissipated Marchioness, who tempts and yields to temptation, is made to play a noble part in the end, won back from sin by generous feeling and strong sense: and the description of Julia Villeneuve's tender care of her mother is so characteristic of the author, that I cannot help quoting a part of it here, though it is not among the powerful parts of the play.