Samuel Dyer (translator)

Samuel Dyer (1725–1772) was an English translator.

Dyer was the son of a jeweller in the City of London. His parents were dissenters, and he was intended for the ministry. After a school kept by John Ward near Moorfields, he was sent to Philip Doddridge's dissenting academy at Northampton. He went to the University of Glasgow, and then the University of Leyden, where he matriculated 16 September 1743 and stayed two years. He returned to England a classical scholar and mathematician, knowing French, Italian, and Hebrew, and a student of philosophy. He refused, however, to become a minister, or to take to any regular work, preferring to spend his time in literary society.

He was an original member of the Ivy Lane Club formed by Samuel Johnson in the winter of 1749, which met weekly at the King's Head inn. Through the influence of Samuel Chandler he obtained the work of translating into Latin a number of tracts left by Daniel Williams, the founder of the library; but he tired of this task. After a visit to France he resolved to translate François-Vincent Toussaint's Les Mœurs, but after the first sheets were printed stopped work Dyer's means at this time were very limited, his father having died and left the bulk of his property to his widow and eldest son and daughter. Johnson and Sir John Hawkins wanted Dyer to write a life of Erasmus, but he revised an old edition of Plutarch's Lives. For this edition (published by Jacob Tonson in 1758) he translated the lives of Pericles and Demetrius, and revised the whole work. He had also acted as tutor in Greek to Richard Gough.

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