A seventeenth century poet of Baliol College, Oxford who benefited somewhat from the patronage of Jonathan Swift who wrote of him ‘here is a young fellow has writ some sea-eclogues, poems of mermen, resembling pastorals of shepherds; and they are very pretty, and the thought is new. Mermen are he-mermaids Tritons, natives of the sea. His name is Diaper. I must do something for him, and get him out of the way. I hate to haveany new wits rise’. William also tried to curry favour with the playwright, Congreve composing another maritime themed poem to him. William died in 1717 at the age of 29 as a country curate. The Faber & Faber book of Poems & Places comments on one of William’s works ‘and Somerset is roundly attacked for snakes, frogs, terrible weather and unwholesome ale by the dyspeptic William Diaper’