DYER, John, English poet, was born in 1699 or 1700 at Aberglasney, in Carmarthenshire, where his father, Robert Dyer, successfully practised as a solicitor. He was sent to Westminster school to be educated under Dr Friend, and was destined to succeed to his father’s business. He showed, however, an inveterate dislike to the study of the law, and, having a taste for design, he induced his parents to allow him to adopt the profession of an artist. He wandered about South Wales, sketching landscapes and occasionally painting portraits. In 1726 his first poem, Grongar Hill, appeared in a miscellany published by Richard Savage, the poet. It was an irregular ode in the so-called Pindaric style, but Dyer entirely rewrote it into a loose measure of four cadences, and printed it separately in 1727. It had an immediate and brilliant success. Grongar Hill, as it now stands, is a short poem of only 150 lines, describing in language of much freshness and picturesque charm the view from a hill overlooking the poet’s native vale of Towy. Artless in an affected age, the natural images which crowd upon one another in this charming little poem are as admirable now as when they were written, and hold an assured place in English literature. Dyer’s ambition to succeed as a painter impelled him to visit Italy, and about ten years after the publication of Grongar Hili he seems to have attained this great desire, and to have spent some time in the south of Europe. It was in consequence of this tour that he wrote his next poem, The Ruins of Rome, a descriptive piece in about 600 lines of Miltonic blank verse. In this work the phraseology is pompous and conventional, but there is considerable knowledge displayed, and the ardour of a true lover of antiquity. The Ruins of Rome appeared in ...