SOURCE: Roe, Nicholas. “‘Unremembered Kindness’: George Dyer and English Romanticism.” In The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, pp. 17-35. London: Macmillan, 1992.

In the following essay, Roe suggests how the doctrine of benevolence in Dyer's writings foreshadows Wordworth's morality of benevolence in “Tintern Abbey.”

His kind heart most warmly sympathised at all times with the cause of civil and religious liberty, which he uniformly espoused by his writings …

The Gentleman's Magazine, NS 15 (1841), 545

                                                                                                    —feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. 

“Tintern Abbey,” 31-6

‘The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself.’ So Charles Lamb described his esteem for George Dyer in a letter to Coleridge, 26 August 1800 (Marrs, i. 235). Elsewhere, however, Dyer frequently turns up in...