Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from "Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost."
"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The Fleece," 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." The romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally in his love of the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a sentence in "The Ruins of Rome":
"At dead of night,
The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears
Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49]
These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have
been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in
"Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The
Fleece."
[1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in English Literature," Chautauquan, Vol. XIV, p. 187.
[2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207.
[3] "Autumn," lines 645-47.
[4] "Life of Philips."
[5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221
[6] Cf. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire." —Wyf of Bathes Tale.