Brathay; and there were two mountain roads which shortened the space between us, though not the time nor the toil. But, notwithstanding this distance, often and often, upon the darkest nights, for many years, I used to go over about nine o'clock, or an hour later, and sit with him till one. Mrs. Lloyd was simply an amiable young woman, of pleasing person, perfectly well principled, and, as a wife and mother, not surpassed by anybody I have known in either of those characters. In figure she somewhat resembled the ever memorable and most excellent Mrs. Jordan; she was exactly of the middle, height and having that slight degree of embonpoint, even in youth, which never through life diminishes or increases. Her complexion may be imagined from the circumstance of her hair being tinged with a slight and not unpleasing shade of red. Finally, in manners she was remarkably self-possessed, free from all awkward embarrassment, and (to an extent which some people would wonder at in one who had been brought up, I believe, wholly in a great commercial town) perfectly lady-like. So much description is due to one who, though no authoress, and never making the slightest pretension to talents, was too much connected subsequently with the lakers to be passed over in a review of their community. Ah! gentle lady! your head, after struggling through many a year with strange calamities, has found rest at length; but not in English ground, or amongst the mountains which you loved at Versailles it is, and perhaps within a stone's throw of that Mrs. Jordan whom in so many things you resembled, and most of all in the misery which settled upon your latter years. There you lie, and for ever, whose blooming matronly figure rises up to me at this moment from a depth of thirty years! and your children scattered into all lands!

But for Charles Lloyd: he, by his literary works, is so far known to the public, that, on his own account, he merits some separate notice.1 His poems do not place him in the class of powerful poets; they are loosely conceived-faultily even at times-and not finished in the execution. But they have a real and a mournful merit under one aspect, which

1 Blank Verse by C. L. and Charles Lamb, 1798. Poetical Essays on Pope, and Desultory Thoughts on London, &c., 1821.-M.

might be so presented to the general reader as to win a peculiar interest for many of them, and for some a permanent place in any judicious thesaurus—such as we may some day hope to see drawn off, and carefully filtered, from the enormous mass of poetry produced since the awakening era of the French Revolution. This aspect is founded on the relation which they bear to the real events and the unexaggerated afflictions of his own life. The feelings which he attempts to express were not assumed for effect, nor drawn by suggestion from others, and then transplanted into some ideal experience of his own. They do not belong to the mimetic poetry so extensively cultivated; but they were true solitary sighs, wrung from his own meditative heart by excess of suffering, and by the yearning after old scenes and household faces of an impassioned memory, brooding over vanished happiness, and cleaving to those early times when life wore even for his eyes the golden light of Paradise. But he had other and higher accomplishments of intellect than he showed in his verses, as I shall presently explain; and of a nature which make it difficult to bring them adequately within the reader's apprehension.

Meantime, I will sketch an outline of poor Lloyd's history, so far as I can pretend to know it. He was the son, and probably his calamitous life originally dated from his being the son, of Quaker parents. It was said, indeed, by himself as well as others, that the mysterious malady which haunted him had been derived from an ancestress in the maternal line; and this may have been true; and, for all that, it may also be true that Quaker habits were originally answerable for this legacy of woe. It is sufficiently well known that, in the training of their young people, the Society of Friends make it a point of conscience to apply severe checks to all open manifestations of natural feeling, or of exuberant spirits. Not the passions-they are beyond their control-but the expression of those passions by any natural language; this they lay under the heaviest restraint; and, in many cases, it is possible that such a system of thwarting nature may do no great mischief; just as we see the American Indians, in moulding the plastic skulls of their infants into capricious shapes, do not, after all, much disturb the ordinary course

of nature, nor produce the idiots we might have expected. But, then, the reason why such tampering may often terminate in slight results is, because often there is not much to tamper with; the machinery is so slight, and the total range within which it plays is perhaps so narrow, that the difference between its normal action and its widest deviation may, after all, be practically unimportant. For there are many men and women of whom I have already said, borrowing the model of the word from Hartley, that they have not so much passions as passiuncles. These, however, are in one extreme; and others there are and will be, in every class, and under every disadvantage, who are destined to illustrate the very opposite extreme. Great passions-passions pointing to the paths of love, of ambition, of glory, martial or literary-these in men-and in women, again, these, either in some direct shape, or taking the form of intense sympathy with the same passions as moving amongst contemporary men-will gleam out fitfully amongst the placid children of Fox and Penn, not less than amongst us who profess no war with the nobler impulses of our nature. And, perhaps, according to the Grecian doctrine of antiperistasis, strong untameable passions are more likely to arise even in consequence of the counteraction. Deep passions undoubtedly lie in the blood and constitution of Englishmen; and Quakers,1 after all, do not, by being such, cease, therefore, to be English

men.

It is, I have said, sufficiently well known that the Quakers make it a point of their moral economy to lay the severest restraints upon all ebullitions of feeling. Whatever may be the nature of the feeling, whatever its strength, utter itself by word or by gesture it must not; smoulder it may, but it must not break into a flame. This is known; but it is not equally known that this unnatural restraint,

1 In using the term Quakers, I hoped it would have been understood, even without any explanation from myself, that I did not mean to use it scornfully or insultingly to that respectable body. But it was the great oversight of their founders not to have saved them from a nickname by assuming some formal designation expressive of some capital characteristic. At present one is in this dilemma: either one must use a tedious periphrasis (e.g. the young women of the Society of Friends), or the ambiguous one of young female Friends. 2 c

VOL. II

falling into collision with two forces at once, the force of passion and of youth, not uncommonly records its own injurious tendencies, and publishes the rebellious movements of nature, by distinct and anomalous diseases. And further, I have been assured, upon most excellent authority, that these diseases, strange and elaborate affections of the nervous system, are found exclusively amongst the young men and women of the Quaker society; that they are known and understood exclusively amongst physicians who have practised in great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham; that they assume a new type, and a more inveterate character, in the second or third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted; and finally, that, if this class of nervous derangements does not increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because the community itself—the Quaker body-does not increase, but, on the contrary, is rather on the wane.

From a progenitrix, then, no matter in what generation, C. Lloyd inherited that awful malady which withered his own happiness, root and branch, gathering strength from year to year. His father was a banker, and, I presume, wealthy, from the ample allowance which he always made to his son Charles. Charles, it is true, had the rights of primogeniture-which, however, in a commercial family, are not considerable-but, at the same time, though eldest, he was eldest of seventeen or eighteen brothers and sisters, and of these I believe that some round dozen or so were living at the time when I first came to know him. He had been educated in the bosom of Quaker society; his own parents, with most of their friends, were Quakers; and, even of his own generation, all the young women continued Quakers. Naturally, therefore, as a boy, he also was obliged to conform to the Quaker ritual. But this ritual presses with great inequality upon the two sexes; in so far, at least, as regards dress. The distinctions of dress which announce the female Quaker are all in her favour. nation eminent for personal purity, and where it should seem beforehand impossible for any woman to create a preeminence for herself in that respect, so it is, however, that the female Quaker, by her dress, seems even purer than

In a

other women, and consecrated to a service of purity; earthly soil or taint, even the sullying breath of mortality, seems as if kept aloof from her person-forcibly held in repulsion by some protecting sanctity. This transcendent purity, and a nun-like gentleness, self-respect, and sequestration from the world-these are all that her peculiarity of dress expresses; and surely this "all" is quite enough to win every man's favourable feelings towards her, and something even like homage. But, with the male Quaker, how different is the case! His dress-originally not remarkable by its shape, but solely by its colour and want of ornament, so peculiar has it become in a lapse of nearly two centuries seems expressly devised to point him out to ridicule. In some towns, it is true, such as Birmingham and Kendal, the public eye is so familiar with this costume, that in them it excites no feeling whatever more than the professional costume of butchers, bakers, grooms, &c. But in towns not commercial -towns of luxury and parade-a Quaker is exposed to most mortifying trials of his self-esteem. It has happened that I have followed a young man of this order for a quarter of a mile, in Bath, or in one of the fashionable streets of London, on a summer evening, when numerous servants were lounging on the steps of the front door, or at the area gates; and I have seen him run the gauntlet of grim smiles from the men, and heard him run the gauntlet of that sound-the worst which heaven has in its artillery of scorn against the peace of poor man—the half-suppressed titter of the women. Laughing outright is bad, but still that may be construed into a determinate insult that studiously avows more contempt than is really felt; but tittering is hell itself; for it seems mere nature, and absolute truth, that extort this expression of contempt in spite of every effort to suppress it.

Some such expression it was that drove Charles Lloyd into an early apostasy from his sect: early it must have been, for he went at the usual age of eighteen to Cambridge, and there, as a Quaker, he could not have been received. He, indeed, of all men, was the least fitted to contend with the world's scorn, for he had no great fortitude of mind; his vocation was not to martyrdom, and he was cursed with