William Barnes and the Greek Language; Lord Byron's Familiar Greek Dialogues

When reading the Dorset dialect poems of William Barnes, we tend to forget his immense knowledge of philology and foreign languages, including Greek.

From An Outline of English Speech-craft, 1878:

From A philological grammar: grounded upon English, and formed from a comparison of more than sixty languages. Being an introduction to the science of grammar and a help to grammars of all languages, especially English, Latin and Greek, 1854:

William Barnes saw his rural poems as belonging to the tradition of the Greek bucolic poets

 like Theocritus and Moschus.

Lord Byron had a great interest in the Greek language, Ancient and Modern (Romaic)

From the Appendix to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II:

Familiar Dialogues: