when he began to compete in verse with his sole literary Associate. He composed the verses called 'A City Flower,' which he sent to 'Temple Bar' in 1865, and presently he had the ecstatic pleasure of seeing them in print. This poem, after long hesitation, Dobson reprinted thirty-four years later, and it has figured in his works ever since. It is a sentimental picture of a girl in a milliner's shop, a graceful and merry composition in the fashion of that day, without any particular characteristic of Austin Dobson's mature style.

But he was now started on his road, and during the next three years he wrote with increasing confidence. A periodical, which has long passed away, 'The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine,' lay open to Monkhouse, and he introduced his friend to the editor. A series of poems by Austin Dobson was published here in 1865 and 1866, among them some that we know. Many others have never been reprinted; and it was the author's wish, strenuously repeated shortly before his death, that they should remain unknown. He had a horror of the 'conscientious' editor of 'complete' posthumous works, who sacrifices the reputation of his victim to a passion for bibliography. But several of these early pieces were retrieved by the author himself; and we turn to 'The Sun Dial,' to 'A Revolutionary Relic,' and in particular to 'Incognita,' with its steady advance in metrical skill, as evidence of the line which Austin Dobson took in starting. Sixty years ago a species of light verse was much in fashion; it was approved of by Mid-Victorian taste, and was exploited with remarkable neatness by Frederick Locker.

There were elements in it of

Tennyson, of Thackeray, and of Praed. It was rather
irritatingly called vers
Stratford-atte-Bowe unknown to Paris. It was expected
to be scrupulously nice.' In this category was included
all verse of an easy and debonair character, from which
gravity and passion were carefully excluded, but in
which an easy note of superficial pathos, and above all
of sentiment, was preserved.

de société, in a French of

the silly phrase vers de société is occasional verse,'

was preserved. A better name for it than

which

comes near to the Gelegenheitsdichtung that

Goethe defended.

In the youth of Austin Dobson, by far the most

skilful proficient in this airy and accidental class of writing was Frederick Locker, whose volume of London Lyrics,' originally published in 1857, had grown to be a sort of standard of perfection. We may recall Locker's own statement with regard to his aim as a poet :

'Occasional verse should be short, graceful, refined, and fanciful, not seldom distinguished by chastened sentiment and often playful. The tone should not be pitched high; it should be terse and idiomatic, and rather in the conversational key; the rhythm should be crisp and sparkling, and the rhyme frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish, and completeness.'

試】

These words express, with remarkable accuracy, the purpose which Austin Dobson put before him in starting on his poetical career. He desired to excel in the little field cultivated so richly by Prior in the 18th and by Praed in the 19th century; and it is important to observe that in his early experiments he made no attempt to extend the borders of this domain, but merely to extract from it the most refined and delicate results of which it was capable. Hence Dobson's earliest advances did not take the shape of any revolt against the sentimental verse of which the latest exponents had been Thackeray and Locker, but of a strenuous selfeducation in the direct art of expression. It is needful that this should be stated, because in later years, as I shall endeavour to explain, his ambition entirely changed. He used, indeed, to deplore, with as near an approach to bitterness as his sweet nature was capable of, that the critics persisted in seeing in him nothing but a writer of }; ' vers de société.' It is true that this injustice long pursued his maturer art, but it is not less true that in his original character he was not to be distinguished from those purveyors of 'light' verse who are hardly admitted into the kingdom of Apollo.

In Dobson's twenty-ninth year, in March 1868, Anthony Trollope published in his new periodical, St Paul's Magazine,' a poem which marks a sudden advance in the poet's career, and constitutes the earliest exhibition of his individual character as a writer. This was 'Une Marquise'; and to read

'As you sit there growing prouder,

And your ringed hands glance and go,
And your fan's frou-frou sounds louder,

And your beaux yeux flash and glow ;—
Ah! you used them on the Painter,
As you know,

For the Sieur Larose spoke fainter,
Bowing low,

Thanked Madame and Heaven for mercy
That each sitter was not Circe,

Or at least he told you so;
Growing proud, I say, and prouder
To the crowd that come and go,
Dainty Deity of Powder,

Fickle Queen of Fop and Beau'

with the rich colour of its images and speed of movement, and with the bell-like recurrence of its rhymes, is to realise that a new mastery of art had arisen out of the thin grace of' vers de société.' This dates the opening of Austin Dobson's first mature period, and 'Une Marquise' was quickly followed by 'Avice,' that little masterpiece of winged lightness which sacrificed nothing to poverty of sentiment; by A Dead Letter,' in which the narrative form borders for the first time on the dramatic; and by 'The Sick Man and the Birds,' in which the dramatic is successfully achieved. All these pieces belong to 1868 and 1869; and it is pleasant to record that the interest taken in them by Anthony Trollope, and the care he took in meticulous revision and criticism of them, found a delighted and grateful response in Austin Dobson's modest conscientiousness.

At this point an odd incident has to be recorded, since it raised a violent storm in the porcelain tea-cup of the poet's susceptibility. Hitherto the poems which he had published in periodicals-and they had now become rather numerous-had been uniformly signed with the initials A. D.' The full name had never yet appeared in print. In 1869 he wrote, and in February 1870 he published, in 'St Paul's Magazine' the poem now well known under the title of The Drama of the Doctor's Widow,' which has always been, and still is, a universal favourite with his readers. Dobson had formed the acquaintance of a young lawyer, Richard Webster,

who was nearly three years his junior, and who, as Lord Alverstone, was destined to reach the highest position in the legal profession. In 1870 Webster had not long been called to the Bar, but was beginning to be known. In September of the following year, Webster asked Austin Dobson, in an offhand way, whether he had seen a poem called 'The Drama of the Doctor's Widow,' to which Dobson answered, 'Yes-I wrote it!' Two days later, Webster sent a letter to Dobson, in which he said, 'an intimate friend of mine tells me she wrote, and has shown me a MS. of "The Drama of a Doctor's Widow," adding further particulars.' Only those who recollect the temperament of the poet will be able to conceive the tempest of agitation which swept over him at this aggression; the charge did indeed become somewhat serious when, in spite of all statements to the contrary, the lady persisted in claiming, not merely 'The Drama of the Doctor's Widow,' but all the other poems signed 'A. D.,' although these were not her initials. Austin Dobson was put to the inconvenience of collecting evidence of his handwriting and of the recollection of common acquaintances, even of printers and presscorrectors; and still-and this is perhaps the most amazing fact in the whole imbroglio-Webster could not be induced to withdraw his support of the lady, who died not long afterwards, firmly impenitent. All that Webster would ever concede was, after a delay of ten months, an acknowledgment that he had failed to prove a claim, which, however, he still favoured.

The painful little incident belongs to literary history because the distracted poet, who saw in it far more than its intrinsic importance, recorded the whole story in a pamphlet, now of excessive rarity, which he issued in 1872. This is the earliest of his voluminous writings in book-form, and here for the first time his name was printed in full. The brochure possesses particular value from the fact that, in his almost feverish determination to prove his right to the invention and conduct of the poem, he prints in it, besides several fragments, a complete first draft of what he originally called 'A Story of Pyramus and Thisbe,' diverging in many places from the finished text. The little story, which has elements of mild mystery, may be completed by saying that Dobson

and Webster had no further communication till they met accidentally in Edinburgh thirty years later, when Lord Alverstone greeted the poet civilly, but made no reference to the old charge of plagiarism.

A second period in the development of Austin Dobson was marked by his discovery in 1870 of the poets who were called Preraphaelite. It is characteristic of his cloistered habit of mind that the advent of Swinburne had left him almost untouched, while against 'Poems and Ballads' of 1866 he had felt a gentle but distinct repulsion. The publication of Rossetti's 'Poems,' on the other hand, deeply interested him; and he was thrown back upon a book which he now read for the first time, William Morris''Defence of Guinevere.' The result was to incite Dobson not exactly to a following of Morris, but to a treatment of romantic subjects in a manner wholly serious, and with a new refinement of language. The pieces which belong to this second period are dispersed through Dobson's collected editions, and their peculiar character has, I think, never been perceived. It is therefore worth while to consider them together, and to recognise a section of his poetical baggage which has been unduly ignored. The principal examples-all, I believe, composed in 1870 and 1871-are the 'Angiola songs; André le Chapelain'; the elegy beginning :

'Him best in all the dim Arthuriad

Of lovers of fair women, him I prize,-
The Pagan Palomydes ';

'The Virgin with the Bells'; and above all, The Death
of Tanneguy du Bois,' with its haunting refrain :

'Ah! I had hoped, God wot,—had longed that she
Should watch me from the little-lit tourelle,

Me, coming riding by the windy lea-
Me, coming back again to her, Giselle;

Yea, I had hoped once more to hear him call,
The curly-pate, who, rushen lance in rest,
Stormed at the lilies by the orchard wall ;—
There is no bird in any last year's nest.'

Something of the same element is found in the slightly later Death of Procris' and the elaborate Spenserian study, 'The Prayer of the Swine to Circe.' These poems