lected and edited The Poetical Works of William Strode (1907), and in 1908 printed from manuscript an anonymous play, The Partiall Law (c. 1615-1630). Other discoveries were printed in periodicals: notably, letters of Chapman and Ben Jonson in the Athenæum (March and April 1901) and New Light upon Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ in the Quarterly Review (July 1909). His carefully annotated Catalogue of Books Printed for Private Circulation was completely issued in 1906; and he liked to fill the inner covers of his trade catalogues with criticism, quaint humour, and literary gossip. He always spoke modestly of his own poems—Rosemary and Pansies (1903) and A Century of Sonnets (1910). Cleon in the Palace of Truth, by ‘Lucian Lambert’, was a satire on the politician (1904). Since his death, Sonnets and Lyrics of the Present War, The Close of Life, The Approach of Death, containing some impressive sonnets, The Dreamer of the Castle of Indolence, have been issued by his son (1915), the two last privately. A Lover’s Moods was issued by the Rowfant Club (1923). He died at Haverstock Hill 14 December 1914. He had three sons and two daughters. The business passed to his sons, Percy John and Eustace Arthur Dobell.
There is a process engraving of Dobell in the National Portrait Gallery.
[S. Bradbury, Bertram Dobell, 1909; private information; personal knowledge.]
DOBSON, HENRY AUSTIN (1840-1921), poet and man of letters, was born at Plymouth 18 January 1840, the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, civil engineer, by his wife, Augusta Harris. He was educated at Beaumaris grammar school and at a private school at Coventry, before being sent to the gymnase at Strasbourg, then a French city. At the age of sixteen he came home and entered the Board of Trade, in which he served from 1856 to 1901. His service was chiefly in the marine department, of which he was a principal clerk from 1884 till his retirement. William Cosmo Monkhouse [q.v.] and Samuel Waddington were in the same branch with him, and (Sir) Edmund Gosse was attached to the commercial department as translator, so that the Board of Trade of those days was lyrically described by an American observer as ‘a nest of singing birds’. Lord Farrer, one of the official heads, put another view when he wrote of ‘certain civil servants who would have been excellent administrators if they had not been indifferent poets’. It is not contended by Austin Dobson’s friends that Farrer’s unkind observation was not meant to include him, or that he was more than conscientious in his official duties. The Bibliography of Austin Dobson, published in 1900, before he retired, contains over 300 pages and makes it clear that his mind was principally applied to literature. A shy, nervous man, he was always anxious lest the evidences of his unofficial industry should jeopardize his post. After his retirement he received (1904) a civil list pension of £250.
It would be idle to deny that all the work of importance which Dobson did was in literature. For more than half a century he was constantly producing printed work, and during the first twenty years it was almost entirely in rhyme. His first publication, the verses ‘A City Flower’, appeared in Temple Bar for December 1864—immature work, as is also ‘Incognita’ dated 1866. But ‘Une Marquise’, written in 1868, and ‘The Story of Rosina’ in 1869, showed his gift in its perfection. Thetwo last, with much else, appeared in St. Paul’s, and to its editor, Anthony Trollope, was dedicated Dobson’s first volume, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), which reached its third edition in 1875. It contained some of his most characteristic pieces, mixed with inferior stuff. Proverbs in Porcelain, published in 1877, was almost all in his best vein. These two works, blended in one volume with certain additions and omissions, appeared in America in 1880 as Vignettes in Rhyme. In 1883 this selection, again somewhat altered, was published in London as Old World Idylis and achieved immense popularity. Two years later a companion book, At the Sign of the Lyre, had an equal success. The latter contained some of his best things——‘The Ladies of St. James’s’, ‘The Old Sedan Chair’, and the enchanting verses ‘My Books’, written as late as 1883-1884. But though he continued to write verse intermittently for the rest of his life, and at least a quarter of his collected Poetical Works is dated after 1885, none of this later verse has much importance. He had ceased to be a poet, and had become a most industrious journeyman of letters.
Dobson's first prose volume, The Civil Service Handbook of English Literature, published in 1874, was probably written as a piece of hack work. But in 1879, when he was at his best in verse writing, appeared his William Hogarth in the
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