No particulars of his life there have been recorded. Like other painters, he doubtless mused amidst the empty streets of what Coleridge used to call the "silent city," climbed the seven hills, took drawings of the principal ruins, and gazed, perhaps, through hopeless yet happy tears at the inimitable masterpieces of its art. Here, too, he is believed to have laid the plan of his poem, the "Ruins of Rome." He returned to England in 1740, and shortly after finished and gave it to the world.

Various causes at this time combined to induce Dyer to quit the profession of a painter, and to devote himself to the Church. He had not risen to great eminence in his art. Judging of his painting by his poetry, we should say that it must have been more sketchy than minutely accurate, and distinguished rather by splendour of design than by finish of execution. His constitution, too, had suffered. A lengthy residence in Rome had taught him habits of solitary and serious reflection; and, perhaps, the sight of a city wholly given to idolatry had confirmed and deepened his zeal for the Protestant faith. At all events, he took orders, and in a letter to William Duncombe, dated 24th November 1756, he thus himself describes the slow steps of his preferment:"Lord Chancellor (Hardwicke) has been favourable to me. This living (Coningsby, Lincolnshire) is £120 per annumthe other, called Kirkby, is £110; but my preferment came in this course :-Calthorp, in Leicestershire (£80 a-year), was given me by one Mr Harper in 1741: that I quitted in 1751 for a small living of £75, called Belchford, ten miles from hence, and given me by Lord Chancellor through Mr Wray's (Daniel Wray, Esq., one of the depute-tellers of the Exchequer, a friend to virtue and the Muses) interest. Sir John Heathcote gave me this, and lately procured me Kirkby of Lord Chancellor, without my solicitation. I was glad of this, on account of its nearness to me, though I think myself a loser by the exchange, through the expenses of the seal, dispensations, journeys, &c., and the charge of an old house, half of which I am going to pull down."

So soon as he was settled in Calthorp, Dyer married. His

wife's name was Ensor. In the same letter just quoted he goes on to say, "My wife's name was Ensor, whose grandmother was a Shakspeare, descended from a brother of everybody's Shakspeare. (Dyer does not say whether it was Gilbert, Richard, or Edmund Shakspeare from whom his wife was sprung, and we cannot supply the omission). We have four children living-three are girls-the youngest, a boy, six years of age. I had some brothers-have but one left; he is a clergyman, lives at Mary bone, and has such a family of children as puts me in mind of a noted statue at Rome of the river Nile, on the arms, legs, and body of which are crawling or climbing ten or a dozen little boys and girls." One delights to fancy all these little rogues surrounding their “Uncle John, the poet," when he came to town on a visit-now pinning him to the chair with their interfolded arms-now leaping over him as he lay on the sofa-and now dancing around him in their uncontrollable glee. It may be laid down as an axiom that all true poets love little children, and are loved by them in return.

Quietly settled in the country, married, happily we presume, to a lady with the blood of Shakspeare in her veins, possessed of a competence, if not of a fortune, and with a fine family around him, Dyer seems to have been far happier in middle life than in his earlier days. His charges were not onerous, and he had plenty of leisure to devote to his favourite studies, especially to poetry. He commenced the

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Fleece," in which he meant to condense all his learning, knowledge, and fancy, and to make it the magnum opus of his mind. In this work he was, to a certain degree, assisted by Akenside, and he thus acknowledges the obligation in a letter, dated 1757, and addressed to Mr Duncombe: "Your humble servant is become a deaf, and dumb, and languid creature, who, however, in this poor change of constitution being a little recompensed with the critics' phlegm, has made shift, by many blottings, and corrections, and some helps from his kind friend, Dr Akenside, to give a sort of finishing to the 'Fleece,' which is just sent up to Mr Dodsley; but as people are so taken up with politics, and have so little inclination to

read anything but satire, I am in doubt whether this is a proper time for publishing it." His foreboding was fulfilled, but not for the reason he himself assigns. The "Fleece was judged unfortunate in the selection of subject, and in execution, heavy and prolix. A wag once conversing about it to Dodsley, who was, in somewhat exaggerated terms, expressing a hope of its success, inquired the author's age. When told he was somewhat advanced in life, he replied, "He will be buried in woollen."* Akenside, on the other hand, declared "that he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's "Fleece," for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence.

The "Fleece" appeared in 1757; and on the 24th July in the next year its author died. He was fifty-eight years of age, and seems, by his own statement, to have become prematurely infirm. He is represented as a man of excellent private character, and of sweet and gentle dispositions. He was beloved by, and he loved, a man who had latterly few friends, Richard Savage, and exchanged with him complimentary poems. He was the friend of Aaron Hill, of Hughes, of Akenside, and of various other contemporary authors. John Scott of Anwell left behind him an essay on Grongar-hill, and another on the Ruins of Rome, which were published among his "Critical Essays," by Hoole, in 1785.

So much for the somewhat scanty details supplied us of Dyer's life. We come now to the consideration of his poetry. Gray, in one of his letters, places Dyer at the head of the poets of that day; and even Johnson, whose prejudices, not only against him and his writings, but against all descriptive poetry and poets, was strong, nevertheless allows him the possession of genius. And Wordsworth, in lines we shall quote when we come to speak of "The Fleece," pays a generous and glowing tribute to Dyer's powers. "Grongar

* Of this witticism Christopher North says, "It is the most wretched of the wretched. The little meaning it had at the time having been somehow or other, we believe, dependent on the repeal of a tax affecting grave-clothes."

hill" belongs to a class of poems whose merit is in the inverse ratio of their size, and which, by a few masterly strokes, and a light, easy measure, gain immortality, as it were, for halfprice. Another peculiarity of this poem, and of the class to which it belongs, is, that it intermixes moral reflection with the description of natural objects, and not merely mingles them, but does it with such grace and skill, that they blend as well as meet. To this order belong Denham's "Cooper'shill;" Milton's "L'Allegro and Penseroso;" Burns' "Lines on scaring some Water-fowl at Loch Turit;" Shelley's "Lines written among the Euganean Hills;" Wordsworth's "Eclipse," and a hundred more, which will occur to the memory of the poetical reader. In these the description, however exquisite, is always subordinate to the sentiment; the moral element shines out of and through the physical; and instead of the scene overpowering the imagination, the imagination leads the scene captive at its pleasure. Thus, in Shelley's words, how completely does he subject the splendid landscape seen from the Euganean summit to his own permanent mood of misery. It is but a beautiful isle in the ocean of his boundless, bottomless woe:

“Ay, many flowering islets lie

In the waters of wide agony.

To such an one this morn was led
My bark, by soft winds piloted.
Mid the mountains Euganean
I stood listening to the pœan

With which the legion'd rocks did hail
The sun's uprise majestical:
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar,
Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Fleck'd with fire and azure, lie

In the unfathomable sky;

So their plumes of purple grain,

Starr'd with drops of golden rain,

Gleam above the sunlight woods," &c.

In Burns' "Loch Turit," the clang of the retreating water

fowl is just the echo of the voice of the poet's independent and

indignant spirit. Here is Burns describing his own experience :

And in several passages of "Grongar-hill," you see the disappointed, yet loving and hoping spirit of the itinerant painter, particularly in the well-known lines,—

"See on the mountain's northern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide,
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadow cross the eye!
A step, methinks, might cross the stream,
So little distant dangers seem;

So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed through hope's delusive glass.
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,

Which, to those who journey near,
Barren, brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way;
The present's still a cloudy day."

From these lines Campbell has unquestionably derived the much admired paragraph which opens "The Pleasures of Hope," although some will say that his fine genius has acted to Dyer's thoughts, as they both represent distance doing to the landscape, by adding to them ethereal hues and an ideal charm. Christopher North maintains-we think unjustly— of Dyer's verses, that while the images are natural and impressive, the expression is poor, and that the "contrast between the present and the future" is feebly and obscurely set forth. To us, on the contrary, the lines seem all simple, vigorous, comprehensive; and the last of them, especially, clings to our mind with a strange tenacity, and we repeat it ten times oftener than any of the sounding verses of Campbell

"The present's still a cloudy day."

E