ve years later than
Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in Wales, was bred to the law,
but gave it up to study painting under Jonathan Richardson. His earlier
and better poems were written while he wandered about South Wales in
pursuit of his art. _Grongar Hill_, the most notable of them, was
published in 1726. Love of the country is what inspires his verses,
which have a very winning simplicity, only touched here and there by the
conventions deemed proper for poetry:

Grass and flowers Quiet treads,
On the meads and mountain-heads,
Along with Pleasure, close ally'd,
Ever by each other's side;
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill.

The truth of his observation endeared him to Wordsworth; and his moral,
when he finds a moral, is without violence:

How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadows cross the eye!
A step methinks may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem;
So we mistake the Future's face,
Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass;
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which, to those who journey near,
Barren, and brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way,
The present's still a cloudy day.

It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the
opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_:

I am resolv'd, this charming day,
In the open fields to stray;
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the Gods do tread.

His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake:

And there behold a bloomy mead,
A silver stream, a willow shade,
Beneath the shade a fisher stand,
Who, with the angle in his hand,
Swings the nibbling fry to land.

It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an
original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have
been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two
arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in
the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a
long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew
that glistens on his youthful verses.

James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of
a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinbur