combined with the worship of Jehovah. He admires the "stupendous orbs," and the immortal harmonies, but he takes care to remember that we must die, and mediates, in most edifying terms, amongst the tombs. Such works can hardly be judged by the common literary canons. Writings which are meant to sanctify imaginative indulgences by wresting the ordinary language to purposes of religious edification are often, for obvious reasons, popular beyond their merits. Sacred poetry and religious novels belong to a world of their own. To the profane

reader, however, the fusion of deistical sentiment and evangelical truth does not seem to have thoroughly effected. There is the old falsetto note which affects us disagreeably in Shaftesbury's writings. Hervey, after all, lives in the eighteenth century, and though as his "Theron and Aspasia" proves, he could write with sufficient savour upon the true Evangelical dogmas, the imaginative symbolism of his creed is softened by the contemporary currents which blend with it.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 438.

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 coversation the author's age was asked; and being represented as advanced in life, "He will," said the critic, "be buried in woolen."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779-81, Dyer, Lives of the English Poet.

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.-MALONE, EDMOND, 1791, Maloniana, ed. Prior, p. 419.

He is represented as a man of excellent private character, and of sweet and gentledispositions. 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 contemporary authors. GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1858, ed., The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer and Green, p. 107.

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.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779– 81, Dyer, Lives of the English Poets.

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.WARTON, JOSEPH, 1782, Essay on Pope, vol. I, p. 35.

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.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1798-1820, Literary Hours, vol. II, p. 35.

The poet cannot trust himself frankly to describe Nature for her own sake, like Wordsworth or Shelley. PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1896, Landscape in Poetry, p. 171.

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."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 177981, Dyer, Lives of the English Poets.

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.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1798-1820, Literary Hours, vol. 1, No. xii, p. 160.

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.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

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.-GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1858, ed., The Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer and Green, pp. 113, 114.

GENERAL

Has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1751, Letter to Horace Walpole; Works, ed. Gosse, vol. II, p. 220.

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! -WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 1810-15, To the Poet, John Dyer.

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. CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 276.

Is, or was, known as the author of "Grongar Hill" 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.—ARNOLD, THOMAS, 1868-75, Chaucer to Wordsworth, p. 286.

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 Aneas, 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 wellbeing. 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.-DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 208.

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 the sonnet probably best known by addressed to him by Wordsworth.STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XVI, p. 287.

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." GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature.

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.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 113.

PERSONAL

The 22d of October [1758], will be remembered as a remarkable day in the history of the Town, and not only of

Boston, but of New England; for on that day died the Rev. Mr. Thomas Prince, a benefactor of his country; leaving a name which will be venerated to the remotest

ages, if literature shall then be valued; a name which may with pride be emulated by the inquirers after historical knowledge, and the admirers of precision and accuracy in the paths of history. DRAKE, SAMUEL G., 1855, History and Antiquities of Boston, p. 646.

He was pronounced by Dr. Chauncy the most learned scholar, with the exception of Cotton Mather, in New England, and maintained a high reputation as a preacher, and as a devout and amiable man. Six of his manuscript sermons were published after his death, by Dr. John Erskine, of Edinburgh. DUYCKINCK, EVERT A. AND GEORGE L., 1855-65-75, Cyclopædia of American Literature, ed. Simons, vol. I, p. 87.

That 22d of October was the Sabbath; the day on which his collection of Psalms and Hymns was used, for the first time, by his people. The lips of their beloved pastor were forever sealed; but they still had his life and spirit embalmed in those sacred poems, to be with them, guiding them and comforting them. In the twinkling of an eye, had he been changed; mortality had blossomed into immortality; his own sweetest thoughts awoke in music on the tongues of his weeping congregation, as he sank into that blessed sleep which Christ giveth to His beloved. The mystery of the two lives was made perfect by his departure, for he still praised God. in the voices of the living, though gone to be a member of the choir of angels.MANNING, J. M., 1859, Thomas Prince, The Congregational Quarterly, vol. 1, p. 16.

writer before Thomas Prince, qualified himself for the service of history by so much conscious and specific preparation; and though others did more work in that service, none did better work than he. The foundation of his character as a historian was laid in reverence, not only for truth, but for precision, and in willingness to win it at any cost of labor and of time. He likewise felt the peculiar authority of originals in historical testimony, and the potential value, for historical illustration, of all written or printed materials whatsoever; and while he was yet a collegeboy, driven by the sacred avarice of an antiquarian and a bibliographer, he began to gather that great library of early American documents, which kept growing upon his hands in magnitude and in wealth. as long as his life lasted, and which, notwithstanding the ravages of the time, of British troops, of book-borrowers, and of book-thieves, still remains for him a barrier against oblivion, and for every student of early American thought and action, a copious treasurer-house of help.—TYLER, MOSES COIT, 1878, A History of American Literature, 1676–1765, vol. 11, p. 144.

GENERAL

Some may think me rather too critical, others that I relate some circumstances too minute. As to the first, I think a Writer of Facts cannot be too critical: It is Exactness I aim at, and would not have the least mistake, if possible, pass to the World. As to the Second, those Things which are too minute with Some, are not so with Others. And there's none who attentively reads a History either ancient or modern, but in a great many Cases, wishes the Writer had mentioned some minute Circumstances, that were then commonly known, and thought too needless or small to be noted.

proved the New England Psalm Book, "by an endeavor after a yet nearer approach to the inspired original, as well as to the rules of poetry;" he took a special interest in physical science, and formed quite definite opinions about earthquakes, comets, "the electrical substance," and so forth. For all these things, he was deeply honored in his own time, and would have been deeply forgotten in ours, had he not added to them very unique perform ances as an historian. No American

History of New England.

The most important event of 1735, in this connection, was the issue of the first volume of the "Chronological History of New England.” New England." . . . The list of manuscript authorities to which he refers is indeed extensive and most valuable, and though several of them have since been printed, their publication does not detract from the worth of his labors in arranging them, or alter our appreciation of his honesty and exactness in transcribing them.