DYER, JOHN, born in 1700, was the second son of a respectable solicitor of Aberglasney in Caermsrtheushire. He received his educa tion at Westminster school, and when that was completed, began the study of the law. Au early taste for poetry and painting led bins to relinquish his legal pursuits, and he travelled about South Wales in the capacity of an itinerant painter. At this period ho wrote Warm= ' Grongar which was published lu 1727. Though he seems to have made but small proficiency in painting, he went to Italy to study, where he wrote the ' Ruins of Rome,' a descriptive poem, published in 1740. On his return to England, having a small independence, he retired into the country, entered into holy orders, and married a lady named Ensor, whom he states to be a descendant of Shakapere. He was a man of excellent moral habits, of a singularly modest and un ambitious temper, and strongly imbued with the love of a country life. He died in 1758, shortly after the publication of his longer poem, 'The Fleece.' ' The Fleece' is a long poem, of a purely didactic kind. The middle of the last century was remarkably prolific in poems which took for their model Virgil's 'Georgics.' Dyer's ' Fleece,' Graiuger'a 'Sugar
cane,' and Phillips'. 'Cyder,' are all of this class. By selecting subjects essentially unpoetical, whatever might be the ingenuity of the writers, they could do no more than make a tolerable poem of a bad kind ; for they did not confine themselves to a mere outline of the subject, which they might fill up with what colouring they pleased, but essayed to give, in a poetical form, the intricacies and minutia) of various branches of manufacture. The selection of Virgil's Georgics' fot a model W83 in itself a fallacy, as we question whether this work, with all its beauties, would be much read at the present time were it not for the opportunity which it affords of studying one of the most elegant writers of the Augustan age, and for the light it throws on the agriculture of the ancients. Bnt Dyer's 'Fleece' contains many very pleasing passages of description, and there is about it, as in all of his poems, a simple, unassuming, unaffected strain of genuine, though it may be somewhat humble, poetic feeling.