Page:The Poems of John Dyer (1903).djvu/12

 death, soon afterwards. His taste for painting led him to become a pupil of Jonathan Richardson, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Richardson's written work inspired Reynolds, but his teaching would not seem to have matured Dyer's capacity to anything beyond a skilled mediocrity. According to one of his own published letters, the youth, on leaving Richardson, became "an itinerant painter "in South Wales and the neighbouring counties of England. He must have paid visits to London about this time. Savage and Aaron Hill were among his friends. From an epistle by the former, it appears that, like his master, he painted portraits. His character, gentle, amiable, independent and unworldly, endeared him to those whom he met, if it did not attract the literary world.

Probably in 1724, he went, still as a painter, to Italy. He spent two years in Rome and Florence and other cities that were a matter of course. Like some of the next century's poets, whom he faintly but certainly foreshadowed, he was delighted by the riches of Nature, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and antiquity, which he saw. With a milder rapture than Shelley's, he was happy in sight of the Baths of Caracalla and the Coliseum. He is said to have been more successful with pen and ink sketches than with crayon and oils; but it may be conjectured that his work in colour and line had little but the indirect value of training his eye in a way that