1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lloyd, William Watkiss

LLOYD, WILLIAM WATKISS (1813–1893), English man of letters, was born at Homerton, Middlesex, on the 11th of March 1813. He received his early education at Newcastle-under-Lyme grammar school, and at the age of fifteen entered a family business in London, with which he was connected for thirty-five years. He devoted his leisure to the study of art, architecture, archaeology, Shakespeare, classical and modern languages and literature. He died in London on the 22nd of December 1893. The work by which he is best known is The Age of Pericles (1875), characterized by soundness of scholarship, great learning, and a thorough appreciation of the period with which it deals, but rendered unattractive by a difficult and at times obscure style. He wrote also: Xanthian Marbles (1845); Critical Essays upon Shakespeare’s Plays (1875); Christianity in the Cartoons [of Raphael] (1865), which excited considerable attention from the manner in which theological questions were discussed; The History of Sicily to the Athenian War (1872); Panics and their Panaceas (1869); an edition of Much Ado about Nothing, “now first published in fully recovered metrical form” (1884; the author held that all the plays were originally written in blank verse). A number of manuscripts still remain unpublished, the most important of which have been bequeathed to the British Museum, amongst them being: A Further History of Greece; The Century of Michael Angelo; The Neo-Platonists.

See Memoir by Sophia Beale prefixed to Lloyd’s (posthumously published) Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends (1894), containing a list of published and unpublished works.