which was not recited or read to me, or submitted to me in its first draft. Of his prose the same cannot quite be said, perhaps, but I am at a loss to point to a single prose work, even, which was not read to me before it was sent to press. It must be expressly understood that I was not expected merely to admire, or in the first instance principally to admire, but to criticise textually with the utmost severity. Remember,' he once wrote to me, I depend on you to drive the harvest mice out of my standing corn!' I endeavoured, with the best of my ability, to act up to that responsibility, and I examined every line, weighed every adjective, shook my head over every inversion, with rhadamanthine severity. Dobson did not always, of course, accept my verbal censure, but he gave to every suggestion his patient attention; and sometimes three, or even four, drafts of a poem would be submitted to me before we were both completely satisfied. When I look back over nearly half a century, I am astonished to recall with what serenity, with what an absence of vanity or irritability, he received my verbal criticisms, which were sometimes, I am afraid, vivaciously expressed.

His next volume of poems, 'Proverbs in Porcelain,' which appeared in 1877, displays the result of the extreme solicitude for perfection which occupied him in these years. He now mixed a good deal in the society of those contemporaries whom he had not hitherto known, and in whose conversation he found stimulus and encouragement. He saw Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frederick Locker, and Lord de Tabley (John Leicester Warren); it was with these rather than with the members of an elder generation, in whose company his temperamental timidity forbade him to expand, that Dobson most enjoyed companionship-with these, and with certain artists from whom he found that a personal sympathy radiated-Alfred Parsons, Edwin Abbey, George Boughton. In Proverbs in Porcelain,' which the careful reader has to examine in its original form, since the contents of it have long been dispersed in the numerous reprints of Dobson's poetical writings, in this 1877 volume will be found, I think, the quintessence of his genius. Nowhere else is he more completely himself, and this volume contained specimens

of every class of his finest production. It opened with a series of miniature dramas in rhyme, six groups in Sèvres, each as light as thistle-down and as subtle as a comedy by Marivaux. No one has excelled, in their own limited compass no one has equalled, these tiny masterpieces of sagacity and tenderness, enshrined in a form which is pure perfection, without a trace of effort or a whiff of the lamp. English literature, rich as it was, is permanently richer for 'Good Night, Babette!' and 'The Song out of Season.'

It is richer, too, for the studies in the humour and picturesqueness of the 18th century, which now began more and more to absorb the attention of the poet. His earliest important essay in this direction was 'The Ballad of Beau Brocade,' and I think that he never went further in the meticulous restoration of a forgotten social scene. This, however, recalls a portion of Austin Dobson's work to which I have not hitherto drawn attention, his prose, critical, historical, and biographical. This will be found to deal almost exclusively with the 18th century, that object of his incessant preoccupation. His activity as a prose writer is generally supposed to have been subsequent to his poetical successes, and so in the main it was; but it will probably come as a surprise to many readers of that universal favourite, the Four Frenchwomen' of 1890, to learn that the essays in this volume belong to Austin Dobson's youth, and were published successively in 'The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine' so early as 1866. He had the habit of recurring, over and over again, to his main themes. For instance, his final biography of Hogarth was published in 1898, but his earliest work on that painter dates from 1879. In a similar way, he made Richardson, Steele, Horace Walpole, Goldsmith, and Fanny Burney his particular property by dint of investigations which never ended. It is instructive to compare the original edition of his 'Life of Fielding' (1883) with the latest reprint, with its careful corrections and important additions. He never considered his work finished or the portrait ready to leave the easel; and this is perhaps the reason why, from a purely aesthetic point of view, his prose is rarely so satisfactory as his verse. In his Fables of Literature and Art,' which are among his most finished poems,

nothing is superfluous and every word in its place; in analogous studies of the 18th century in prose, the author's excess of conscientiousness makes him overload the page, by clogging it with instances and parentheses with which the reader could well dispense. This was the result of an unflagging severity of scholarship; but it did not always add to the reader's satisfaction.

The closest parallel between Dobson's verse and prose is to be found between his tales in rhyme, such as 'The Noble Patron' and 'The Squire at Whitehall,' and the most graceful of the volumes of essays called 'EighteenthCentury Vignettes.' In both the Horatian influence is strongly marked; at his best he possesses, in fuller measure, perhaps, than any other English writer, the Horatii curiosa felicitas. This was not the result of accident or instinct, for it may be interesting for an ear-witness to record that, when Austin Dobson, after the publication of 'Vignettes in Rhyme,' was presented to Tennyson, that alarming vates inquired, in sepulchral tones, Are you a classic? Then become one! Read Horace every day of your life!' Dobson did not carry out this counsel quite to the letter, but with his customary docility in adopting good advice, he forthwith made a searching and prolonged study of the 'Odes' and 'Epistles,' a study the result of which upon his subsequent verse must be patent to the most careless observer, and may be traced upon his meticulous prose as well.

Little concerned with the vain racket of the life about us, Austin Dobson moved in a delicate world of his own, a microcosm where everything was fragrant and harmonious, and where the past and the present were mingled in the clearness of a rose-coloured air. The charm of his wit and the lucidity of his fancy were controlled by the scruples of a fastidious artist; and, when much that is violent has sunken into oblivion for ever, his writings may still float towards posterity on the stream of their purity and perfection.

EDMUND GOSSE.

Art. 5.--RIVER CONTROL IN MESOPOTAMIA.

1. The Irrigation of Mesopotamia. By Sir W. Willcocks. Revised edition. Spon, 1917.

2. Report on the Development of Mesopotamia, with Special Reference to the River Systems. Simla: Government Press, 1917.

3. The Euphrates as a Navigable Waterway, SamawahMusaiyib. Basrah: Government Press, 1918.

4. Correspondence regarding Post-War Irrigation Policy in Mesopotamia. Baghdad: Government Press, 1919. 5. Brief Note on Irrigation Works in Mesopotamia up to November 1918. Baghdad: Government Press, 1919. 6. Report on the Administration of the Irrigation Directorate from February 1918 to March 1919. Baghdad: Government Press, 1919.

7. Note on Irrigation in Mesopotamia. Baghdad: Government Press, 1919.

THEY that go down to the sea in ships, we are told, see the works of the Lord. Those whose navigation is confined to the waters of a river can scarcely expect admission to that privilege in the same degree. On the other hand, they see also the works of man and the interaction of human operations with the forces of nature. It is related, perhaps untruly, of General Townshend that, when beleaguered in Kut, his heart sick with hope deferred, he signalled to the commander of the relieving force, 'Are you sure that you are on the right river?' The intelligent traveller who sets out by river-steamer from Basrah for Baghdad will not have progressed far beyond Qurnah, where the Tigris and one arm of the Euphrates meet, before he is fain to ask himself the same question. For he finds the broad stately river rapidly dwindling to the dimensions of a ditch, and becoming even more tortuous as it does so, until, in the neighbourhood of Ezra's Tomb, about forty miles above Qurnah, it is no wider than the Ouse at Huntingdon, and certainly not so deep.

From a point a few miles below Ezra's Tomb to another, four miles below the little town of Qal'at Salih, a distance of forty odd miles, is the region known as the Narrows, which gave so much difficulty to our Expeditionary Force in the earlier stages of the campaign. It

is a series of constricted reaches, full of loops and bends, flanked on either hand by miles of impenetrable marsh. Above the Narrows, as far as the mouth of the Butairah

effluent, fifteen miles beyond 'Amarah town, the traveller in his progress notices the river once more expanding. Its course is rather more direct, and the marshes recede from sight. Above the Butairah they cease altogether