"The Ruins of Rome" was a descriptive poem in 545 lines of Miltonic blank-verse. It was published anonymously in 1740, but its reference to the earlier "Grongar Hill" that "I sung inglorious" establishes its authorship obviously enough. As in "Grongar Hill", Dyer's approach to antiquity is personalised and a forerunner of the "Age of Sensibility" that led poetry in the direction of Romanticism. The poem has been described as "largely responsible for the eighteenth-century revival of a unique subgenre of landscape poetry dealing with the ruins of the ancient world."