1863 POEMS Armstrong Dyer + Green LEATHER BICKERS Bdg

John Armstrong (1709-1779). —Poet, son of the minister of Castleton, Roxburghshire, studied medicine, which he practised in London. He is remembered as the friend of Thomson, Mallet, and other literary celebrities of the time, and as the author of a poem on The Art of Preserving Health, which appeared in 1744, and in which a somewhat unpromising subject for poetic treatment is gracefully and ingeniously handled. His other works, consisting of some poems and prose essays, and a drama, The Forced Marriage, are forgotten, with the exception of the four stanzas at the end of the first part of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, describing the diseases incident to sloth, which he contributed.

John Dyer (?1699 - December 15, 1758) was a Welsh poet who wrote in the English language.
The son of a solicitor, he was born either in 1699 or 1700 at Aberglasney, in Carmarthenshire. He was sent to Westminster School and was intended for a career in law, but on his father's death he began to study painting. He wandered about South Wales, sketching and occasionally painting portraits. In 1726 his first poem, Grongar Hill, appeared in a miscellany published by Richard Savage, the poet. It was an irregular ode in the so-called Pindaric style, but Dyer entirely rewrote it into a loose measure of four cadences, and printed it separately in 1727. It had an immediate and brilliant success. Grongar Hill, as it now stands, is a short poem of only 150 lines, describing in language of much freshness and picturesque charm the view from a hill overlooking the poets native vale of Towy. A visit to Italy bore fruit in The Ruins of Rome (1740), a descriptive piece in about 600 lines of Miltonic blank verse.