John Dyer

[3] Dyer's dislike for Westminster was chronicled in a 1714 entry in his Journal of Escapes: "Ran from school and my father, on a box of the ear being given me strolled for three or four days – found at Windsor."

[4] John's father, who wanted his son to pursue a career as solicitor, subdued the poet's longing to channel his creativity through painting and writing.

Ralph M. Williams comments that it was upon his return to Aberglasney "that we first begin to know something of his personality and see for the first time the conflict in him between the dreamy romantic and the practical man of business that runs through his life.

"[5] Having grown up among the ancient stoneworks in the Aberglasney grounds, it was not surprising that Dyer had developed an interest in antiquities and the love of nature that characterises his work.

It was under Richardson that Dyer met his coffee house group of friends, Thomas Edwards, Daniel Wray, George Knapton and Arthur Pond.

Dyer, with Richardson's blessing, sailed to Italy in 1724 to continue his studies and made his way straight to Rome, where he admired its objects of antiquity.

[11] Among sculptures and reliefs, he notes the Hercules, the Apollo, the "Venus de Medici," the Laocoön group, Trajan's column, the temple of Pallas, the arches of Titus and Constantine and the Borghese Dancers (now in the Louvre).

But though he appreciated the beauties about him, his staunch Protestantism was appalled by what he regarded as the superstitious practices of Catholicism: "God of our Fathers, keep us from the ways of these foul hirelings," he exclaimed in a poetic fragment written at the time.

Resuming his journey northwards, he visited the ruins of Otricoli, where he found inspiration for his poem signifying this shift of mood, "Written at Ocriculum in Italy, 1725".

[14] Continuing on his journey to Florence, his visits to museums and buildings there instigated a shift in his interests from the classical to the Renaissance period to create one of his few surviving paintings, a copy of Antonio da Correggio's masterpiece, "Madonna Adoring the Christ Child."

Martha's reply apologises for her tardiness and compliments both his poetic and artistic tributes: "Your claim demands the bays in double wreath, Your poems lighten and your pictures breathe".

Savage too paid his tribute "To Mr John Dyer, occasioned by seeing his picture of the celebrated Clio" in which, going beyond outward likeness, "You eye the Soul".

[18] The most that Dyer himself will admit in his epistle "To a Famous Painter" (his teacher Jonathan Richardson), also written from Rome, is the modest confession that "As yet I but in verse can paint".

Written in a mannered imitation of Miltonic blank verse, it opens with Dyer painting among the ruins, "studious to excel, of praise and fame ambitious".

Living in the Lincolnshire fens, "among reeds and mud, begirt with dead brown lakes", as he reported in verses sent to a friend,[29] proved fatal to Dyer's tubercular condition.

In the same year, after having received some acclaim, Dyer rewrote Grongar Hill in four-stressed octosyllabic couplets roughly modelled on those of Milton's L'Allegro and contrasting strongly with the version of pastoral in Alexander Pope's Windsor Forest.

Now the love of arts, And what in metal or in stone remains Of proud Antiquity, thro' various realms ⁠ And various languages and ages fam'd, Bears me remote o'er Gallia's woody bounds.

It was a georgic in the line of Virgilian imitations written during the 18th century that included John Philips' Cyder, Christopher Smart's The Hop-Garden (1752) and James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764).