"
Besides three or four volumes of poetry Mr. Lloyd wrote novels:--"Edmund
Oliver", published soon after he became acquainted with my Father, and
"Isabel" of later date. After his marriage he settled at the lakes. "At
Brathay," (the beautiful river Brathay near Ambleside,) says Mr. De
Quincey, "lived Charles Lloyd, and he could not in candour be considered
a common man. He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in
conversation very extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind,
applied to the philosophy of manners, and the most delicate 'nuances' of
social life; and his Translations of Alfieri together with his own
poems, shew him to have been an accomplished scholar."
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.
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