Poet, born near Llandilo, and educated at Westminster, abandoned law for art, and in 1727 published “Grongar Hill,” remarkable for simplicity, warmth of feeling, and exquisite descriptions of scenery. He next travelled in Italy, returned in bad health to publish the “Ruins of Rome” (1740), took orders, and in 1741 became vicar of Catthorpe, Leicestershire, which he exchanged later for the Lincolnshire livings of Belchford, Coningsby, and Kirkby-on-Bain. “The Fleece” (1757), a didactic poem, is praised by Wordsworth in a sonnet.

Personal

  Dodsley, the bookseller, was one day mentioning it [“The Fleece”] to a critical visitor, with more expectation of success than the other could easily admit. In the conversation the author’s age was asked; and being represented as advanced in life, “He will,” said the critic, “be buried in woolen.”

  Mr. Dyer was a man of uncommon understanding and attainments, but so modest and reserved, that he frequently sat silent in company for an hour, and seldom spoke unless appealed to; in which case he generally showed himself most intimately acquainted with whatever happened to be the subject.

  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.

Grongar Hill, 1727

  “Grongar Hill” is the happiest of his productions: it is not indeed very accurately written; but the scenes which it displays are so pleasing, the images which they raise so welcome to the mind, and the reflections of the writer so consonant to the general sense or experience of mankind, that when it is once read, it will be read again.

  Of English poets, perhaps none have excelled the ingenuous Mr. Dyer in this oblique instruction, into which he frequently steals imperceptibly in his little descriptive poem entitled “Grongar Hill,” where he disposes every object so as it may give occasion for some observation on human life. Denham himself is not superior to Mr. Dyer in this particular.

  In the “Grongar Hill” of Dyer we have, likewise, a lyric effusion equally spirited and pleasing, and celebrated for the fidelity of its delineation; the commencement, however, is obscure and even ungrammatical, and his landscape not sufficiently distinct, wanting what the artist would term proper keeping. It is nevertheless a very valuable poem and has secured to its author an envied immortality.

  The poet cannot trust himself frankly to describe Nature for her own sake, like Wordsworth or Shelley.

The Fleece, 1757

  The woolcomber and the poet appear to me such discordant natures, that an attempt to bring them together is to couple the serpent with the fowl…. Let me, however, honestly report whatever may counterbalance this weight of censure. I have been told that Akenside, who, upon a poetical question, has a right to be heard, said, “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.”

  This beautiful, but too much neglected poem, had ere this attracted the admiration it so justly merits, had not the stearn critique of Dr. Johnson intervened to blast its rising fame. A juster relish of the excellences of poetry, and a more candid style of criticism, may be considered as a characteristic of several of the first literary men of the present day; and, but for the hard censure of the author of the Rambler, the pages of Dyer would now, perhaps, have been familiar to every lover and judge of nervous and highly finished description. As it is, however, they are seldom consulted, from an idea, that little worthy of applause would gratify the inquirer.

  The witticism on his “Fleece,” related by Dr. Johnson, that its author, if he was an old man, would be buried in wollen, has, perhaps, been oftener repeated than any passage in the poem itself.

  There is a sluggishness in the general motion of the verse which has injured the popularity of the poem. Milton’s blank verse is sometimes heavy, but whenever he gets great, his lines become wheels instinct with spirit, and they bicker and burn, to gain the expected goal. Thomson, too, in his higher moods, shakes off his habitual sleepiness, and you have the race of an elephant, if not the swiftness of an antelope. But Dyer, even when bright, is always slow, and, in this point, too, resembles Wordsworth, whose “Excursion” often glows, but never rushes, like a chariot wheel. On the whole, to recur to the figure of Gideon’s Fleece, Dyer’s poem is by turns very dry and very dewy; now very dark, and anon sparkling with genuine poetry…. On the whole, we think “the Fleece” rather an unfortunate subject for a poem, although the fact that Dyer has made so much of it, and won praise from even fastidious critics, is no slight evidence that he possessed a strong and vivid genius.

General

  Has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious.

	Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled
	For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade
	Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced,
	Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,
	A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay,
	Long as the shepherd’s bleating flock shall stray
	O’er naked Snowdon’s wide aërial waste;
	Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!

  Dyer’s is a natural and true note, though not one of much power or compass. What he has written is his own; not borrowed from or suggested by “others’ books,” but what he has himself seen, thought, and felt. He sees, too, with an artistic eye, while at the same time his pictures are full of the moral inspiration which alone makes description poetry.

  Is, or was, known as the author of “Grongar Hill” (1727), and “The Fleece” (1757). The latter is in blank verse, and totally worthless; the former, however, is a pretty poem of description and reflection, breathing that intoxicating sense of natural beauty which never fails to awaken in us some sympathy, and an answering feeling of reality.

  Is not a painter who would constrain words to be the medium of his art; he is a poet. He has a heart that listens, an eye that loves; his landscape is full of living change, of tender incident, of the melody of breeze and bird and stream…. The farmer still collecting his scattered sheaves under the full-orbed harvest moon, the strong-armed rustic plunging in the flood an unshorn ewe, the carter on the dusty road beside his nodding wain, the maiden at her humming wheel, delight Dyer’s imagination no more than do the Sheffield smiths near the glaring mass “clattering their heavy hammers down by turns,” the builder, trowel in hand, at whose spell Manchester rises and spreads like Carthage before the eyes of Æneas, the keen-eyed factor inspecting his bales, the bending porter on the wharf where masts crowd thick. The poet’s ancestors, as he is pleased to record in verse, were weavers, who, flying from the rage of superstition, brought the loom to

	“that soft tract
	Of Cambria, deep-embayed, Dimetian land,
	By green hills fenced, by ocean’s murmur lull’d.”

From them he obtained a goodly heritage—his love of freedom and his love of industry. He honoured traffic, the “friend to wedded love;” he honoured England for her independence and her mighty toil; America, for her vast possibilities of well-being. He pleaded against the horrors of the slave trade. He courted the favour of no lord. And, in an age of city poets, he found his inspiration on the hillside and by the stream.

  Dyer’s love of scenery at a period when the taste was out of fashion may give him some claim to remembrance…. Dyer’s longer poems are now unreadable, though there is still some charm in “Grongar Hill” and some shorter pieces. He is probably best known by the sonnet addressed to him by Wordsworth.

  It seems odd that the extreme awkwardness of the opening lines of “Grongar Hill,” and a certain grammatical laxity running through the work of Dyer, should have been treated with so much lenity by critic after critic…. Dyer’s Welsh landscapes, with their yellow sun, purple groves, and pale blue distance, remind us of the simple drawings of the earliest English masters of water colour, and his precise mode of treating outdoor subjects, without pedantry, but with a cold succession of details, connects him with the lesser Augustans through Somerville. As the gentleman predicted, Dyer is buried in the “woolen” of his too-laborious “Fleece.”

  In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys.