Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II COLEBIDGE AND CHABLES LLOYD 1796 1797 Chaeles Lloyd, born in 1775, the eldest of the family, was a contemplative, self conscious, sensitive youth, continuously afflicted with nervous weakness. He had much of the Lake poets' delight in scenery; he was a profoundly interested inquirer into ethical questions; he would examine an emotion with almost more assiduity than his master Eousseau himself; and quite early he ceased to subscribe to the teaching of Friends. Quaker families now and then produce such exotics. On leaving school early in the nineties, he followed the natural course of an eldest son and entered his father's business. For a while the work there was congenial, but in 1794 his health gave way, and he descended from the high stool, never to return to it. On recovering,he proceeded to Edinburgh with some idea of studying medicine. Edinburgh, however, held him but a brief space, and we find him next, in 1795, living with Wordsworth's friend, Thomas Wilkinson Wilkinson of the spade at Yan wath. It was there that Lloyd produced his first volume of poems. ' He has a poetical turn,' wrote Wilkinson of his young friend, ' and writes most beautiful verse. His attachment is to a pastoral life, as most natural and consistent with his own feelings. He would prefer life in the country with 100Z. a year to 1,000?. in the town.' Most introspective men, however confident and light hearted they may afterwards become, are serious in the late teens. Letters from Charles Lloyd to his brother Eobert, then apprentice at Saffron Walden, show him to have been doubly so. In 1794, the writer being then nineteen and Eobert sixteen, Eobert was thus adjured : ' Do not give way to useless speculation. I advise you particularly to read Rousseau's ' Emilius,' in French if you can, and...
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