adulation
of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had
to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view
his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost
universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must
have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.

[Sidenote: John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).]

In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the
Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life
poetical materials in _The Fleece_ (1757), a poem in four books of blank
verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and
intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in
_Grongar Hill_ (published in the same year as Thomson's _Winter_), a
poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the
first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. 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.
Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:

'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile compleat,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,'
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.'

Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for _The
Country Walk_, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into
the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn
from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he
writes:

'I am resolved this charming day
In the open field to stray,
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the gods do tread.
Before the yellow barn I see
A beautiful variety
Of strutting cocks, advancing stout,
And flirting empty chaff about;
Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood,
And turkeys gobbling for their food;
While rustics thrash the wealthy floor,
And tempt all to crowd the door.

* * * * *

And now into the fields I