Anstey's _New Bath Guide_ has a
combination of epistolary fiction, realism, use of naive observers,
changing points of view, sweeping view of the social scene, great range
of subjects, rolicking verse forms, and tone of detached amusement which
suggests a satirist who, while still largely derivative, had the talent
to create new techniques. Churchill and Robert Lloyd are explicit in
their wish to break from Augustan style. Churchill argues that it was "a
sin 'gainst Pleasure, to design / A plan, to methodize each thought, each
line / Highly to finish." He claims to write "When the mad fit comes on"
and praises poetry written "Wild without art, and yet with pleasure wild"
(_Gotham_ [1764], II, 167-169, 172, 212). His satire--with its
deliberate, irreverant, "Byronic" run-on lines, fanciful digressions,
playful indifference to formal structure, impulsively involuted syntax,
long, wandering sentences--seems to move, as does Robert Lloyd's satire
(at a somewhat slower pace), toward a genuinely new style. In being
chatty, fluid, iconoclastic, spontaneous-sounding, self-revealing, his
satire might eventually prove capable of dealing with the problems that
the Augustan satirists had predicted but did not have to deal with so
directly. But both Churchill and Robert Lloyd died before they could
develop their styles to the point that they had a new, timely statement
to make. Anstey failed to develop beyond the _New Bath Guide_, and his
influence proved to be more important on the novel than on verse satire.

Evan Lloyd's first satire, _The Powers of the Pen_, is a clever but
ordinary satire on good and bad writing. It has some historical interest
as an example of the early influence of Rousseau in England, of part of
the attack on Samuel Johnson for his adverse criticism of Shakespeare,
of the influence of Churchill (Lloyd declared himself a disciple), and
of the expression of the fashionable interest in artlessness which was
influenced as much by Joseph Warton as by Rousseau. In a "quill shop" the
narrator discovers magic pens which write like various authors. The one
whose "Mate was purchas'd by Rousseau" can:

Teach the Passions how to grow
With native Vigour; unconfined
By those vile Shackles, which the Mind
Wears in the _School of Art_....
Yet will no _Heresies_ admit,
To gratify the _Pride of Wit_ (p. 30).

He advances these critical dicta elsewhere in this satire, condemning
Johnson because