Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/304

300 The idea of the "Ruins of Rome" strikes more, but pleases less, and the title raises greater expectation than the performance gratifies. Some passages, however, are conceived with the mind of a poet; as when, in the neighbourhood of dilapidating Edifices, he says,

The Pilgrim oft At dead of night, mid his orison hears Aghast the voice of time, disparting tow'rs, Tumbling all precipitate down dash'd, Rattling around, loud thund'ring to the Moon.

Of "The Fleece," which never became popular, and is now universally neglected, I can say little that is likely to recall it to attention. 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. When Dyer, whose mind was not unpoetical, has done his utmost, by interesting his reader in our native commodity, by interspersing rural imagery, and incidental digressions, by cloathing small images in great words, and by all the writer's arts of delusion, the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture, sink him Rh