[In the following essay, Matthews provides a critical overview of Dobson's work and reputation as a poet.]

As Mr. Lang told us in his sympathetic paper on M. Théodore de Banville, some literary reputations are like the fairies in that they cannot cross running water. Others again, it seems to me, are rather like the misty genii of the Arabian Nights, which loom highest when seen from afar. Poe, for example, is more appreciated in England than at home; and Cooper is given a more lofty rank by French than by American critics. In much the same manner, we note, Carlyle gained the ear of an American audience when he was not listened to with attention in Great Britain; and the scattered verses of Praed were collected together for American admirers long before the appearance of an English edition. And so it is, I think, with Mr. Austin Dobson, whose position as a leader in one division of English poetry was recognized more immediately and more unhesitatingly in these United States than in his native Great Britain. To Mr. Dobson the young school of American writers of familiar verse—to use Cowper's admirable phrase—look up as to a master; and his poems are read and pondered and imitated by not a few of the more promising of our younger poets.

Mr. Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth, January 18, 1840. He comes of a family of civil engineers, and it was as an engineer that his grandfather, toward the end of the last century, went to France, where he settled, and married a French lady. Among the earliest recollections of Mr. Dobson's father was his arrival in Paris on one side of the Seine as the Russians arrived on the other. This must have been in 1814. But the French boy had long become an English man when the poet was born. At the age of eight or nine Austin Dobson was taken by his parents—so a biographer tells us—"to Holyhead, in the island of Anglesea; he was educated at Beaumaris, at Coventry, and finally at Strasburg, whence he returned, at the age of sixteen, with the intention of becoming a civil engineer." But in December, 1856, he accepted an appointment in the civil service, where he has remained ever since. Thus he has been able to act on the advice of Coleridge, often urged again by Dr. Holmes, to the effect "that a literary man should have another calling." Dr. Holmes adds the sly suggestion that he should confine himself to it; and this is what—for nearly ten years—Mr. Dobson did. He dabbled a little in art, having, like Théophile Gautier, the early ambition of becoming a painter. He learned to draw a little on wood. He wrote a little, mostly in prose. In fact, there are only four poems in the first edition of Vignettes in Rhyme which were written before 1868. It was in this year that St. Paul's magazine was started by Anthony Trollope, an editor at once sympathetic and severe; he appreciated good work, and was unsparing in the kindly criticism which might make it better. In St. Paul's, therefore, between March, 1868, and March, 1874, appeared nearly twoscore of Mr. Dobson's pieces, including some of his very best: 'Tu Quoque,' 'A Dialogue from Plato,' 'Une Marquise,' 'An Autumn Idyll,' 'Dorothy,' 'A Gentleman of the Old School,' 'Avice,'—with its hazardous, bird-like effect, French in a way and in exquisite taste,—and the subtle and pathetic 'Drama of the Doctor's Window.' In October, 1873, there was published the first edition of Vignettes in Rhyme, and the poet received for the first time that general recognition which denies itself to the writer of verses scattered here and there, throughout magazines and newspapers. Vignettes in Rhyme passed into its third edition; and less than four years after its appearance Mr. Dobson made a second collection of his verses, published in May, 1877, as Proverbs in Porcelain. From these two volumes the author made a selection, adding a few poems written since the appearance of the second book, and thus prepared the collective American volume, called Vignettes in Rhyme, issued by Henry Holt & Co. in 1880, with a graceful and alluring introduction by Mr. Stedman. Old-World Idylls, published in London in the fall of 1883, is based on this American selection of 1880. It has been followed by At the Sign of the Lyre, which includes most of the poetry he wrote before 1885. Unfortunately we have not Mr. Dobson's complete poems even in these two collections, for his own fastidious taste has excluded poems which the less exacting reader had learned to like, and which the admirers of fine humorous verse will not willingly let die. Let us hope that there will be vouchsafed to us, in due time, a volume in which we may treasure Mr. Dobson's Complete Poetical Works. Akin to the fastidiousness which rejects certain poems altogether—and quite as annoying to many—is the fastidiousness with which the poet is continually going over his verses with a file, polishing until they shine again, smoothing an asperity here, and there rubbing out a blot. This is always a dangerous pastime, and the poet is rarely well advised who attempts it, as all students of Lord Tennyson will bear witness. If the poet is athirst for perfection, he may lay his poems by for the Horatian space of nine years, but when they are once printed and published, he had best keep his hands off them. Of course the most of Mr. Dobson's alterations are unexceptionable improvements, yet there are a few that we reject with abhorrence.

Mr. Aldrich has said that Mr. Dobson "has the grace of Suckling and the finish of Herrick, and is easily master of both in metrical art." The beauty of his poetry is due in great measure to its lyric lightness. He has many lines and many whole poems which sing themselves into the memory, and cannot be thrust thence. Who that has made acquaintance with the 'Ladies of St. James's' can forget "Phillida, my Phillida"? And who cannot at will call up before him Autonoë and Rosina and Rose and all the other "damosels, blithe as the belted bees," whom the poet has set before us with so much breezy freshness? To know them is to love them, and to love the poet who has sung them into being. Next to the airy grace and the flowing and unfailing humor which inform all Mr. Dobson's poems, perhaps the quality which most deserves to be singled out is their frank and hearty wholesomeness. There is nothing sickly about them, or morbid, or perverse, as there is about so much contemporary British verse. Mr. Dobson is entirely free from the besetting sin of those minor poets who sing only in a minor key. He has no trace of affectation, and no taint of sentimentality. He is simple and sincere. His delicacy is manly, and not effeminate. There is a courtly dignity about all his work; and there is nowhere a hint of bad taste. Mr. Locker once spoke to me of the 'Unfinished Song,' and said that "the spirit is so beautiful"; and of a truth the spirit of all Mr. Dobson's work is beautiful. There is unfailing elevation. Mr. Dobson, in Joubert's phrase, never forgets that the lyre is a winged instrument. Here is a lyric, not one of his best known, and not in the style he most frequently attempts; but it is lifted out of commonplace, though the subject is hackneyed and worn; it soars, and sings as it soars, like the lark: