mark a phase in the evolution of Austin Dobson's talent, a phase which was soon, and perhaps happily, abandoned. It was not encouraged by those whose judgment, in those early days, he respected, partly no doubt because they had grown to expect another class of poetry from him, but partly because what excited admiration of the Preraphaelites was an audacity, a fire, which Dobson had no wish to display. But his experiments in this direction, especially if extracted and put side by side, are interesting; and, now that the splendour and flame s of the protagonists have subsided, perhaps there is more r of the real pathetic romance of the Morte d'Arthur' about 'The Death of Tanneguy du Bois' than about the daring pastiche of Rossetti and Swinburne. However this may be, there can be no question that Dobson's brief excursion into Preraphaelitism was highly beneficial to his style. It freed him from 'vers de société.' It taught him the value of combining richness with simplicity, and the necessity of rejecting mere conventional verbiage. He marked his abandonment of it by a quaint burlesque, The Peacock on the Wall.'

He returned, with vigour refreshed, to his earlier manner, in which seriousness was invariably relieved by a smile or by a touch of gentle human indulgence. Some of the poems of this period will always be favourites with his readers. They include 'A Gentleman of the Old School' and 'A Gentlewoman of the Old School,' where the rivalry with Praed is patent, but where the challenge is as successful as it is deliberate:

• Patience or Prudence,-what you will,
Some prefix faintly fragrant still
As those old musky scents that fill
Our grandams' pillows;

And for her youthful portrait take

Some long-waist child of Hudson's make,
Stiffly at ease beside a lake

With swans and willows.'

Here also is 'The Story of Rosina,' a poem of unusual length for Austin Dobson, founded on an incident in the the life of the painter, François Boucher:

'The scene, a wood. A shepherd, tip-toe creeping,
Carries a basket, whence a billet peeps,

To lay beside a silk-clad Oread sleeping

Under an urn; yet not so sound she sleeps
But that she plainly sees his graceful act;

“He thinks she thinks he thinks she sleeps," in fact.' The references here to Hudson, in 'A Gentleman of the Old School' to Reynolds, in 'Rosina' to the famous 'Panier Mystérieux '-references not forced upon the reader, but realised by those who look carefully under the surface of the text-mark the development of an element in Austin Dobson's work which was henceforth to be dominant above all others, namely, his acute sympathy with the art and life and literature of England and France in the 18th century.

All this time, his name was unknown and his initials observed by only a handful of readers. But in 1873, being in his thirty-fifth year, he ventured on a wider appeal. He published his first book, 'Vignettes in Rhyme,' dedicated to Anthony Trollope. The collection was preceded by a little epigram which was presently dropped and has never, I think, been revived. It is too graceful to be lost, and I venture to reprint it here:

'Go, little Book, on this thy first emprise ;

If that thou 'scape the critic Ogre-land,

And come to where young Beauty, with bright eyes,
Listless at noon, shall take thee in her hand,
Tell her that nought in thy poor Master stirs
Of art, or grace or song-that is not hers.'

The volume, in fact, was laid at the feet of the Maiden of the Period, as we saw her in the annual show of the Royal Academy, or as she stepped, 'shod with neat balmorals, on the seaweeds and the corals' through the pages of Punch.' This element in the verse of Austin Dobson was never again to be so prominent as it was in 'Vignettes in Rhyme,' but it was always to exist, and it is useless to attempt to ignore it. He did not wish to ignore it. He said, late in his career, when the reaction against Tennyson was beginning to be rampant, that he himself was a Victorian, and proud of being one. He was many other things, but he was the Laureate of the Nice Young Girl, tall, fair, and serious, in white muslin and innocently anticipating the Eligible young Man. In less than fifty years we have passed so Vol. 287.-No. 470.

completely out of the Mid-Victorian atmosphere, into a interest in the picturesqueness of horror and squalor and into violent topsy-turvy ideals of morality, that the innocent world of fancy, as it flourished in 1873, ha become almost inconceivable to young persons or vigorous mental ambition. It was a rose-coloured world, suffused with a transparent radiance of ideality and founded, no doubt, more on an illusion as to what things should be than on observation of what they were i But in the incessant oscillation of taste from one excess to the other, there is probably but seldom a close relation to that primal truth, that realism, that reality, which is t always the fata morgana of every genuine artist. May we not admit that, if Austin Dobson's girlish heroines with

'still the sweet half-solemn look
Where some past thought is clinging,

As when one shuts a serious book
To hear the thrushes singing,'

6

imperfectly interpret the emancipated womanhood of to-day, the horrors of Le Feu' and 'The Red Laughter exploit life from the opposite side with equal inexactitude? Andreyev, in one of his dreadful books, says, 'I have seen many men, and all I saw bore the stamp of stupidity and madness.' It is no more 'realistic to paint all men and women as types of the abysmal brute than to present them all as athletic angels. The pendulum of taste swings to and fro, and it is only Shakespeare and Jane Austen who remain permanently in favour.

Austin Dobson was not unconscious that his temptation lay on the side of the angels. He felt that he must always retain that bias, but he determined to counteract its ill effects by a more and more intense preoccupation with perfection of form. There are pieces in Vignettes in Rhyme' which do not from a technical point of view coincide with the writer's highest standard. Few poets have printed so few incorrect lines as Austin Dobson, but there are some bad verses in his first book, particularly in 'An Autumn Idyl.' He felt his tendency to sentimentality, and was conscious of the danger of a style which coquetted in a spirit of levity with the

tender passion. In order to preserve, what so many of his contemporaries missed, dignity in lightness and good manners in frivolity, he realised that he must preserve an impeccable correctness of form. He must write as Watteau painted, in the tenderest hues of rose-colour and grey.

At this juncture, I must ask pardon if I introduce a personal recollection. It was shortly after the publication of 'Vignettes in Rhyme' that I made Austin Dobson's acquaintance in circumstances which had some imus portance, perhaps, for both. The late Radical politician, Mr Peter Taylor, for many years M.P. for Leicester, lived in a large house, surrounded by gardens on Campden Hill-Aubrey House, long ago destroyed. Here he and his gifted wife entertained on a considerable scale, and hither came many persons of romantic and exotic interest. Mazzini was among those who had haunted Aubrey House at an earlier time. He was a correspondent of a Pen and Pencil Club inaugurated by Mrs Peter Taylor, whose members met on stated occasions to read and exhibit to one another prose and verse, and drawings also, illustrating a theme suggested for each occasion by the amiable hostess. Mr and Mrs Taylor liked to encourage ingenuous youth, and I had the honour of being elected to the Pen and Pencil Club. I attended the meeting in April 1874, when I was gratified by seeing and hearing several persons more or less notorious in their day. I knew no one in the room, nor was the quality of the successive contributions of a very exciting character. But in due course a slim young man, with dark eyes beneath a fine Horatian forehead, rose and read a short piece, in a voice attractive in its modesty and distinction. This, a whisper told me, was Mr Austin Dobson, whose "Vignettes in Rhyme' had recently attracted a good deal of attention and were believed to have been rewarded by an Olympian nod from the Laureate. As it happily chanced, I had just read that volume, with juvenile enthusiasm. But what greatly moved me was that I recognised (I alone, no doubt!) that the piece just read was a rondeau in the French form elaborately defined by Théodore de Banville in the 1874 reprint of his 'Petit Traité de la Poésie Française,' a book which-as we ultimately discovered - was exercising a remarkable

influence over several young English poets. The company presently dispersed, and I shyly ventured to address the author of the rondeau with the remark that I noticed he had kept to the rules of De Banville. He was extremely surprised, and I may dare to say extremely pleased. We wandered out into the night together, and, late as it was we paced the streets in a kind of dream for hours absorbed in our metrical discussions. As Dobson wrote twenty years later in what is one of the most perfect of his lyrics, already on that first evening,

'Much they talked of Measures, and more we talked of Style Of Form and "lucid Order," of "labour of the File."

The association formed that night, and preserved un broken for nearly eight and forty years, was so preciou to me that I must dwell upon it a little longer. We met of course, when we could; but in the very next year ar accident threw us together in a wholly unanticipated way. I was appointed to the Board of Trade, and or my arrival who should be the first to welcome me bu the poet of the rondeau? From this time forth, unti Austin Dobson retired from the public service in 1901 he and I met practically on every weekday in the year when we were neither of us taking a holiday. I suppos it would be difficult to point to another literary associa tion in the history of poetry more persistent or more unruffled. My only excuse, however, for mentioning it here is that it gives me a certain authority when attempt to analyse the poet's intellectual character and to describe his imaginative habits. Almost at once began to occupy towards him the attitude, and some thing much more than the attitude, of the famous ole servant to Molière. From the first-and indeed in & measure this continued long after his retirement-he formed the practice of submitting to me all his com positions before he considered them as finished. Since to continue the quotation began a moment ago,

'He who wrote the writing, as sheet by sheet was penned, (This all was long ago, Sir !) would read it to his Friend.'

The statement is not an idle one. I believe that o all the innumerable verses composed by Austin Dobsor from 1875 onwards there is not a single one now preserved