Dobson, HENRY AUSTIN

Dobson, HENRY AUSTIN, poet, was born at Plymouth, January 18, 1840. He was educated at Beaumaris, Coventry, and Strasburg, and at first intended to follow the profession of his father—a civil engineer, but in 1856 entered the civil service as a Board of Trade clerk. His earliest poems, published in 1868 in Anthony Trollope's St Paul's Magazine, have been followed by a multitude of poems in some of the best contemporary magazines, more especially in the more artificial forms of French verse, the rondeau, the ballade, and the villanelle. These are all marked by rare perfection of form, while many are informed with true natural pathos, or reveal genuine satirical strength. His chief collections of verse are Vignettes in Rhyme, and Vers de Société (1873), Proverbs in Porcelain (1877), and At the Sign of the Lyre (1885). The volume entitled Old World Idylls (Lond. 1883) consisted in great part of pieces selected from the first two. In prose Dobson has published a life of Fielding in the 'English Men of Letters' series (1883), and of Steele in 'English Worthies' (1886), Thomas Bewick and his Pupils (1884, new ed. 1889; republished from the Century magazine), Horace Walpole: a Memoir (1891), and a Life of Hogarth (1891). He wrote the critical notices of Hood, Gay, Praed, and Prior for Ward's 'English Poets' (1880); contributed the articles on the three last named, and on Fielding, Goldsmith, Hogarth, and Richardson to the present work; and has edited Eighteenth-century Essays (1882), Gay's Fables (1882), Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1883), Beaumarchais' Barbier de Séville (1884), and Selections from Steele (1885). His Eighteenth-century Vignettes were published in 1892-96.