Thomas Dyer

“ Wool he has not placed entirely last, although many of the colours which it receives from the dyer are complex. The black dyeing of cotton and silk is placed after the processes of black for wool, as likewise the Turkey red, &c. these being naturally difficult to perform.
{6} White and black have been considered colours by dyers, and with propriety, black forming a part of slate, grey, &c. White is seldom pure; in proportion to its clearness and purity will the colours be with which it is dyed. ”

“ The luncheons that boys and girls take to school with them are often prepared in so careless a way that they are extremely uninviting. The substantial school lunch can be made just as appetizing as the dainty refreshments at an afternoon tea or at a party. ”

“ They do not want to believe in it because they know that the cows, if tested and found to have tuberculosis, will have to be killed.
The reason that dairymen sell us milk from tubercular cows is the same that makes the man with scarlet fever in his house fail to tell the health officer about it; the same that makes the butcher buy and sell meat from diseased cattle; the same that makes some people absolutely regardless of the welfare of others—it is selfishness. ”

“ Teach their unwilling hands, nor yet complain :
Yours with the public good shall ever rise, 100
Ever, while o'er the lawns and airy downs
The bleating sheep and shepherd's pipe are heard ;
While in the brook ye blanch the glist'ning Fleece,
And th' am'rous youth, delighted with your toils,
Quavers the choicest of his sonnets, warm'd 105
By growing traffic, friend to wedded love.
The am'rous youth, with various hopes inflam'd,
Now on the busy stage see him step forth,
With beating breast : high-honour'd he beholds
Rich industry. First he bespeaks a loom ”

“ 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 under insuperable oppression ”

“ Perhaps Lincolnshire was not altogether consoling to one who had known the Towy valley. His last work was full of reminiscences of Wales. At Coningsby, he was busy with his longest poem, "The Fleece." He composed laboriously; and Akenside, who was giving him medical advice, helped him in the work. It is his biggest effort, and when we consider the subject, his greatest success. A very large proportion of dulness is to be expected from Dyer on wool; but it does not obscure the excellence of his design; even where his thought is rustic, the style is pure; in some places he is nearly grand ”

“ Fortunately a good woman took him under her wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer's last days were happy. His best books were his Life of Robert Robinson and his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson's diary, in Leigh Hunt, in Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his untidiness and his want of humour. ”

“ But as his inclinations were always dishonest, he could not long confine himself to honesty and labour, but in a short space meeting with a young man in the neighbourhood, who was very uneasy in his circumstances, and on ill terms with ms friends, and very much disordered in his mind on account of the misfortunes under which he laboured, Dyer began immediately to cast eyes upon him as one who would make him a fit companion. ”

“ Or real exigencies ; passions swift
Forerunning reason ; strong contrarious bents,
The steps of men dispersing wide abroad
O'er realms and seas. There, in the solemn scene, 625
Infinite wonders glare before their eyes,
Humiliating the mind enlarg'd ; for they
The clearest sense of Deity receive
Who view the widest prospect of his works,
Ranging the globe with trade thro' various climes; 630
Who see the signatures of boundless love,
Nor less the judgments of Almighty Pow'r,
That warn the wicked, and the wretch who 'scapes
From human justice ”

“ It is obvious that Dyer must have been much out of doors. He probably knew South Wales intimately. He had a short, practical experience of agriculture, and a love of animals. At the same time he was not a hearty out-door philosopher. His health was always indifferent, and the Campagna had injured it. He seems to have had an amiable, constitutional melancholy, and must have known the angrier moods of that "sweet enemy"; for, in 1729, he is said to have written his epitaph. He called himself "old and sickly" in middle age ”

“ Perhaps Linnet will place the bomb; perhaps Kauffman will do it himself. Dyer has lost his incriminating papers and notes and is on his way to Washington in an endeavor to recover them.
"Associated with Dyer in his horrible activities is Mrs. Augusta Charleworth, occupying a high social position, but of German birth and therefore a German sympathizer. She is clever, and her brains supplement those of Dyer, who seems more shrewd than initiative, being content to execute the orders of others. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Dyer's knowledge of the drama (which formed part of the subject of his first publication) may be guessed, by his having read Shakespeare, "an irregular genius," and having dipped into Rowe and Otway, but never having heard of any other writers in that class. In absence of mind, he probably exceeded every other living man. Lamb has set forth one instance (which I know to be a fact) of Dyer's forgetfulness, in his "Oxford in the Vacation;" and to this various others might be added, such as his emptying his snuff-box into the teapot when he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, &c. ”

“ Sir Edward Dyer, a noted English courtier and poet, was born at Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, and died in 1607. He had a great reputation as a poet among his contemporaries, but very little of his work has survived. “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” is universally accepted as his. ”

“ The best of men—the George Dyers, whom, happily, we have always with us somewhere or other—are as content as most women with their natural destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, dined, talked, and took his leave. ”

“ It had taken the objective it was sent for, and this boy has had to help shell the position where Dyer would have been if the battalion hadn’t been sacrificed. His idea is that it was a perhaps inevitable sacrifice, but the thought that he might have been pouring lead and steel in on his friend, still alive and hiding in a shell-hole, has got on his nerves till he’s all in pieces. He’s a giant physically, but Dyer is twice his size, nevertheless.”
[348] “I’ll find him,” said Jane. She felt suddenly weak with dread. ”

“ During his lifetime, and early in the next century, critics were at a loss to know on what work his fame rested. Edmund Bolton in ‘Hypercritica’ says that he ‘had not seen much of Sir Edward Dyer's poetry;’ and William Drummond, coupling his name with Raleigh's, observes: ‘Their works are so few that have come to my hands, I cannot well say anything of them.’ Rawl. MS. Poet. 85 contains a few poems ascribed, with more or less authority, to Dyer. ”

“ Dyer is not a poet of bulk or dignity sufficient to require an elaborate criticism. "Grongar Hill" is the happiest of his productions: it is not indeed very accurately written; but the scenes which it displays are so pleasing, the images which they raise so welcome to the mind, and the reflexions of the writer so consonant to the general sense or experience of mankind, that when it is once read, it will be read again. ”

“ John Dyer, born 1700, was a much more reputable person. He was educated at Westminster; began life as an itinerant artist, with a keen eye to the beauties of nature, when that taste was little cultivated. He was appointed to the rectory by Sir John Heathcote in 1752, and in 1755 to Kirkby-on-Bain, for which he exchanged Belchford, where he had formerly been. ”

“ It touches the sensitive points in young hearts; and it was by no means without success—the author's first success. It sold much better than his poems, and added "a few pounds" to his slender income.
George Dyer, once a pupil in Christ's Hospital, possessing a good reputation as a classical scholar, and who had preceded Lamb in the school, about this time came into the circle of his familiars. Dyer was one of the simplest and most inoffensive men in the world: in his heart there existed nothing but what was altogether pure and unsophisticated. ”

“ But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.”
Here, in November of that year, happened the accident to George Dyer that supplied Lamb with the subject of his whimsical Elian essay, Amicus Redivivus. Dyer was an odd, eccentric, very absent-minded old bookworm who lived in Clifford’s Inn; Lamb delighted in his absurdities, and loved him, and loved to make merry over his quaint sayings and doings. “You have seen our house,” he writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, in the week after Dyer’s adventure. “What I now tell you is literally true. ”

“ Some of the stanzas in this poem were printed by Byrd separate from the rest: they are here given in what seemed the most natural order.
[The longest and apparently earliest version of this favourite poem is signed "E. Dier," in MS. Rawl. Poet. 85, fol. 17 in the Bodleian Library, and Dr. Hannah [972] attributes it to Sir Edward Dyer, the friend of Spenser and Sidney, whose little pieces were chiefly printed in England's Helicon. Sir Edward Dyer, of Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, was born about the year 1540. He was educated at Oxford, and afterwards was employed in several embassies. ”

“ The reference to clothes is interesting, as it is one of the few subjects in which Edison has no interest. It rather bores him. His dress is always of the plainest; in fact, so plain that, at the Bergmann shops in New York, the children attending a parochial Catholic school were wont to salute him with the finger to the head, every time he went by. Upon inquiring, he found that they took him for a priest, with his dark garb, smooth-shaven face, and serious expression. Edison says: "I get a suit that fits me ”

“ Dyer was more than a pessimist; he was not content merely to look on the dark side of things, but associated himself with every bit of shadow he could find.
"I don't see how that can be. People may give up meat, they may reduce their clothing; but they must have bread," replied George.
"But they don't want nearly so much as they used to," said Dyer bitterly, "and they looks at anything nowadays avore they takes it. When I started business a healthy working man would finish off two loaves a day; and one's as much as he can manage now. The human race ain't improving, sir ”

“ When he himself was upon his death-bed he greeted his old friend Colonel Dyer—he of the absent overcoat and over-shoes—with:
"Dyer, I'm almost gone. I am in the shadow of death. I am standing upon the very brink. I cannot see clearly, I cannot speak coherently, the film of death obstructs my sight. I know what this means. It is the end, but all is well with me. I have no fear. I have said and done things that would have been better left unsaid and undone, but I have never willfully wronged a man in my life. I have no concern for myself. I am concerned only for those I leave behind. ”

“ Tempy's wedding-day approached, and he astonished her with the gift of ten dollars—all he had.
"Ter help buy yer fixin's," he said, and carefully restored the empty leather purse to his pocket.
The days came and went, and the farmers worked from daylight till dark, but Ab Dyer idled about the house or wandered aimlessly through the woods with a gun. Sometimes he would bring home game, but oftener he would come empty-handed.
"What ails him, Peggy?" Sam Upchurch inquired one evening, after Dyer had gone off to bed. "There ain't nothin' to be got outen him." ”

“ But time passed on, and it was Davie's last day in the coal-mine. He was going to exchange that toilsome life, so uncongenial to his taste, but which stern necessity had made him adopt, for a new and brighter occupation, one, too, for which he had always ardently longed. The manager of whom he had spoken to his mother had frequently noticed the gentle, fair-haired boy; prosperity had not hardened his heart (as it so often does) , and recollections of the long-ago flashed ever across him, when he saw Davie bravely striving to do his best to help his mother bear her burden of sorrowful poverty. ”

“ I should think not, indeed. Why, [117] I shall fly far away from this humble neighbourhood!' was his exclamation.
'What! and leave me?'
'Certainly! what else could you expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted and caressed where'er I go!'
'Oh that I had wings like yours, or that you clung to earth!' sighed the tender-hearted Honeysuckle, who, from having been so long in close companionship with the dark, unsociable Chrysalis had actually grown to like him. ”