alive then, but probably not much longer’ (Montgom. Coll. iii. 123–30, Powysland Club).
[All that is known of Dwnn's life is collected by Sir S. R. Meyrick in his Introduction prefixed to vol. i. of Dwnn's Heraldic Visitations of Wales.]
DWYER, MICHAEL (1771–1826), Irish insurgent, was born in co. Wicklow in 1771. He took part in the insurrectionary movement of 1798, joining Joseph Holt with a band of twenty or thirty insurgents from the Wicklow mountains, where he subsequently pursued a sort of bandit career on his own account. He is described as a handsome, intelligent Wicklow man, possessed of some fine traits of character. In 1803 he was concerned in Robert Emmett's insurrection, bringing five hundred men with him to Rathfarnham, but he refused to concur in Emmett's attempt upon Dublin. It was in the house of his niece, Anne Devlin, that Emmett lay for a time concealed after the failure of his plans. Dwyer surrendered to Captain Hume on 17 Dec. 1803. The ‘Belfast News-Letter,’ which calls him a ‘notorious mountain robber,’ gives a minute account of his appearance and manners. He was sentenced only to transportation, on the ground of the humanity he had displayed. Grattan erroneously says that he died on board the convict ship which was to convey him to New South Wales, before the vessel started. Webb wrongly gives 1815 as the date of his death. In that year he became high constable of Sydney. He died at Sydney in 1826, and was buried in the Devonshire Street cemetery there. He married Mary Doyle, a farmer's daughter; Ross dates the marriage in 1778, perhaps a misprint for 1788.
[Belfast News-Letter, 23 Dec. 1803, and 17 Jan. 1804; Grattan's Memoirs of Henry Grattan, 1842, iv. 397; Ross's Correspondence of Cornwallis, 1859, iii. 283; Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography, 1878, p. 162.]
DYCE, ALEXANDER (1798–1869), scholar, eldest son of Lieutenant-general Alexander Dyce of the East India Company's service, was born in George Street, Edinburgh, 30 June 1798. His mother was a daughter of Neil Campbell of Duntroon and Oib, Argyllshire, and a sister of Sir Neil Campbell, sometime governor of Sierra Leone. The year after his birth his parents sailed for India, leaving him in charge of two of his father's sisters at Aberdeen. He was educated at the Edinburgh High School, proceeded in 1815 to Exeter College, Oxford, and took his bachelor's degree in 1819. It was his father's wish that he should enter the service of the East India Company; but Dyce had no taste for this career, and accepted the alternative of taking orders. Between 1822 and 1825 he served two curacies, first at Llanteglos, a fishing village near Fowey, Cornwall, and afterwards at Nayland in Suffolk. In 1825 he abandoned clerical work, settled at Gray's Inn Square, and devoted himself to literary pursuits. So early as 1818, in his undergraduate days, he had edited Jarvis's dictionary of the language of Shakespeare, and in 1821, shortly before his ordination, he had published at Oxford a little volume of translations in blank verse of selected passages of Quintus Smyrnæus. In 1825 he published ‘Specimens of British Poetesses,’ and in 1827 he edited Collins's poems. Two volumes of his edition of George Peele appeared in 1828, and were republished in 1829; a third volume, containing rare works to which he had not had access when the earlier volumes were issued, followed in 1839. In 1830 he published, from a manuscript, ‘Demetrius and Enanthe’ (Fletcher's ‘Humorous Lieutenant’), and collected the works of John Webster in four volumes. His edition of the plays and poems of Robert Greene, in two volumes, appeared in 1831, and in 1833 he completed Gifford's edition of Shirley, editing a part of the sixth volume, and writing the memoir. Between 1831 and 1835 he contributed to Pickering's ‘Aldine’ series editions of Beattie, Pope, Akenside, and of Shakespeare's poems; and in 1833 he published ‘Specimens of English Sonnets.’ In 1836–8 he edited the works of Richard Bentley, in three volumes. It had been his intention to produce an exhaustive edition of Bentley; but ‘the indifference of general readers to classical literature,’ he wrote to John Forster, ‘prevented my carrying out the design.’ In 1840 he published an edition of the works of Thomas Middleton, in five volumes, which was followed in 1843 by an edition of Skelton's works, in two volumes. The first volume of his elaborate edition of Beaumont and Fletcher appeared in 1843, and the last volume (the eleventh) in 1846. In 1850 he issued an edition of Marlowe, in three volumes; in 1856 ‘Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers;’ and in 1857 an edition of Shakespeare, in nine volumes. Dyce is best and most deservedly known by this edition of Shakespeare. Its textual criticism is of the highest value, and the brief annotations are always useful and to the point. The glossary is full and meets most of the difficulties. A vast number of Shakespearean students regard it as the most readable and satisfactory of all the editions of the dramatist. A second edition of Webster, carefully revised, was published in 1857, one vol.; Peele and Greene, one vol., were
