SOURCE: "Austin Dobson and the Rondeliers," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1, March, 1953, pp. 31-42.

[In the following essay, Robinson discusses Dobson's use of the rondeau poetic form.]

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick.

—Edgar Lee Masters

In April, 1874, a young man from the Printed Books Department at the British Museum attended a meeting of the Pen and Pencil Club at the home of the Hon. Peter Taylor, Radical M. P. for Leicester and proprietor of the Examiner. After several readers had led Edmund Gosse to believe he was in the very empire of Dullness,

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 recognized (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.¹

It is noteworthy that Austin Dobson and Edmund Gosse first met at the reading of a rondeau, for together, by precept and example, they, more than anyone else, encouraged the naturalization into English verse of certain medieval French poetic forms, forms which had as common characteristics refrains and regularly recurrent rhymes.

Dobson had come to the forms as much in a spirit of desperation as of adventure. Though he had succeeded in his first volume, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), with verse in traditional English styles, he was aware that his chosen field of light verse was narrow and that the vogue of a practitioner was therefore likely to be brief. In the year after publication of Vignettes, editors had already begun to betray declining interest in his work. And what periodicals, by their frequent rejection of Dobson's offerings, had implied, Edmund C. Stedman in his survey, Victorian Poets (1875), confirmed. After describing Dobson as "not only a gentleman and a scholar, but a most graceful poet," Stedman added a note of warning:

Such a poet, to hold the hearts he has won, not only must maintain his quality, but strive to vary his style; because, while there is no work, brightly and originally done, which secures a welcome so instant as that accorded to his charming verse, there is none to which the public ear becomes so quickly wonted, and none from which the world so lightly turns upon the arrival of a new favorite with a different note.²

Dobson, who had already begun to experiment with new forms, recognized the justice of Stedman's observation. He wrote Frederick Locker,

It seems to me that Stedman just hits the nail on the head and that Holmes and Saxe illustrate his position. The pure vers de société is very narrow and the best men, if they are wise, selon moi, will stop when they have done a couple of dozen successful ones. They must repeat themselves.. . . But what am 1 to do. If I cannot vary myself or strike new veins, I must hold my tongue. I have written twenty pieces since my book came out, eight more than my usual allowance. But I don't think that any of them are up to the old ones, and, on the whole, I fear, at present, it will be at least ten years before my second volume will come out if it does at all.³

The new veins which Dobson began to strike were new only in the sense that they were then unfamiliar to the English reading public. Dobson, like many other English poets of his generation, found inspiration in the literature of France. He shared the sentiment of those who mocked the line in Tennyson's lately published poem, "To the Queen," which noted the danger to art from "poisonous honey stol'n from France."⁴ If Dobson deviated from the sympathies of Tennyson and Victoria, his affection for France was as understandable as their aversion. Drawn to it by bonds of blood and education—his paternal grandmother was French, his father had lived in France for his first fifteen years, and he himself had spent his fifteenth year at the Gymnase in Strasbourg—he was predisposed to respond favorably to any movement in French literature which seemed not to challenge any moral or aesthetic standards observed by his literary-genteel circle in England. Furthermore, with that power of assimilation which was his chief talent, Dobson was well qualified for the task of naturalizing French poetic forms, forms which had been generated and perfected in medieval France, had fallen into disuse during the long reign of neoclassicism, and had been revived by the second generation of French romantic poets, notably Théodore de Banville, Albert Glatigny, and Joseph Boulmier. Though Tennyson felt that any wind from France was an ill wind, and though Arnold tempered his praise of French culture with melancholy reflections on its incurable want of German seriousness, the majority of the rising generation of English poets, seeking new mediums of expression and encouraged by improved political relations between the two countries, naturally turned to France for literary inspiration. This was not the first time France had been put under contribution for poetic forms. Machault had provided Chaucer with the heroic couplet, and Marot and Melin de Saint-Gelais had led Wyatt to the Petrarchan sonnet. But the importations of the 1870s represented the largest transfer of forms from France to Britain. To be sure, the medieval types were not entirely alien to English pens. Chaucer had written imperfect rondels and ballades, Wyatt rondeaus which an ignorant editor printed as defective sonnets,⁵ and Patrick Carey, in the seventeenth century, devotional triolets. But Swinburne's Poems and Ballads of 1866, tours de force of verbal music and stanzaic ingenuity, illustrated convincingly the exhaustion of prosodic impetus given to poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson. Swinburne realized the plight himself; out of the multicolored ashes of splendid and sterile meters peeped, phoenix-like, the novel patterns of rondeau, triolet, and ballade.⁶ Rossetti followed with three translations of Villon in his Poems of 1870.⁷ The best, based on Villon's "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis," imitates the spirit but not the rhyme scheme of the original. While Swinburne used the French forms because he was an experimenter in metrics—and used them unconventionally because he was an iconoclastic experimenter—and Rossetti used the forms only because Villon had used them and he was translating Villon, John Payne was the first Englishman to use them habitually and for their own sakes. Payne, a lonely, ultraconservative London solicitor who wandered in a sort of limbo just outside the Pre-Raphaelite circle, personally acquainted with Banville and devoted to Villon—he founded the Villon Society and brought out the first complete English translation of Villon—published in Songs of Life and Death (1872) a ballade correctly translated from Banville, a kyrielle, and a pantoum.⁸ Up at Oxford, in the same year, Andrew Lang issued Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, a book of poems whose genesis dated back to 1868 when Lang, an undergraduate at Balliol, had begun his translations of Villon, Ronsard, and Du Bellay.⁹ The Fellow of Merton included in his volume an imperfect rondel from Charles d'Orléans, and a faulty rondel and two imperfect ballades from Villon.

In 1873 there began to appear definite signs that the forms were being adopted without alteration and used for original poems. Though Edmund Gosse included seven imperfect rondeaus in On Viol and Flute, Robert Bridges, then a young London physician, working quite independently of all the others, produced a thin pamphlet, Poems, which included two triolets and one rondeau, correctly employed for the statement of serious themes.¹⁰

Swinburne and Rossetti, Payne and Lang, Gosse and Bridges, were the only poets who had published their experiments in books, but they were not the only experimenters in the forms. Theo Marzials, who led a sort of double life as cataloguer at the British Museum and librettist for the Carl Rosa Opera Company, was an early practitioner.¹¹ So was Robert Louis Stevenson,¹² and sowas Cosmo Monkhouse,¹³ Dobson's friend and associate at the Board of Trade.

But though Dobson was undoubtedly aware of the imperfect poems by Swinburne and Rossetti, it is unlikely that he read Payne, Gosse, or Lang, and almost certain that he did not come upon Bridges' correct exercises in the exotic forms before he had employed them himself. His inspiration came directly from France. It came from Théodore de Banville, who had included poems in the old French forms in Odes funambulesques (1857), Les Occidentales (1869), and Trente-six ballades joyeuses (1873), and had devoted a chapter in his Petit Traité de Poésie Française (1872) to "Les poëmes traditionnels à forme fixe." Inspiration also came from poets who had influenced Banville—Villon,¹⁴ Charles d'Orléans, Marot, and Voiture. Driven by the exhaustion of his own particular vein of light verse as well as by the general decadence of romantic meters, and attracted by the offerings of a country to which he was allied by birth and education, Dobson moved decisively to make the new forms peculiarly his own. If the Pre-Raphaelites, with whom he had briefly associated himself, had shared the French Parnassians' abhorrence of didacticism and excessive subjectivity, and had desired a liaison between poetry and the plastic arts, they had not been as self-consciously in revolt against the facile compositions of their predecessors and contemporaries, the Spasmodics. Dobson, who had long been devoted to Gautier, the father of Parnassianism, felt a kinship with one of Gautier's literary sons, Banville. If most of Gautier's followers imitated the marmoreal and melancholy passivity of Leconte de Lisle, a happy few frisked in the train of the "délicieux acrobate," Banville. Airily Banville threaded the mazes of intricate forms, ignoring or lightly mocking the world of his own time. Dobson followed, a somewhat less sprightly elf, echoing Banville's songs of pagan joy with lyrics bright, yet a trifle distrait, as if he could never quite shut out the memory of sadness and pain and the Last Judgment.

In January, 1874, Dobson completed a set of six triolets entitled "Rose-leaves,"¹⁵ which appeared in the Graphic for May 23, 1874. These were Dobson's first published poems in the old French forms. Reminiscent though it is of Hunt's famous "Jenny," the best of these floral offerings, "A Kiss," is a delightful epigram, instinct with heel-and-toe pertness, mellifluous melody, and artful artlessness:

Rose kissed me to-day.
Will she kiss me to-morrow?
Let it be as it may,
Rose kissed me to-day,
But the pleasure gives way
To a savour of sorrow;—
Rose kissed me to-day,—
Will she kiss me to-morrow?

Dobson links his third line smoothly with the repeating fourth, and expertly reverses his mood from complacency to concern in his fifth and sixth.

Though he may have read a rondeau at the meeting of the Pen and Pencil Club in April, 1874, which Gosse has described, Dobson did not publish any poems in French forms, other than the above-mentioned triolets, until 1876. In that year he issued five rondeaus, a ballade, his only virelai nouveau, "July," and his sole pantoum, "In Town." In the next year, specimens of nearly all the known forms appeared in his new collection of poems, Proverbs in Porcelain.

Paradoxically, Dobson is seldom more than an elegant trifler in the comparatively simple patterns of the rondeau and the triolet, while he reveals himself a true poet in the vastly more intricate ballade, of which "On a Fan that Belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour" is a brilliant example:

CHICKEN-SKIN, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Vanloo,
Loves in a riot of light,
Roses and vaporous blue;
Hark to the dainty frou-frou!
Picture above, if you can,
Eyes that could melt as the dew,—
This was the Pompadour's fan!

See how they rise at the sight,
Thronging the Œil de Bœuf through,
Courtiers as butterflies bright,
Beauties that Fragonard drew,
Talon-rouge, falbala, queue,
Cardinal, Duke,—to a man,
Eager to sigh or to sue,—
This was the Pompadour's fan!

Ah, but things more than polite
Hung on this toy, voyez-vous!
Matters of state and of might,
Things that great ministers do;
Things that, maybe, overthrew
Those in whose brains they began;
Here was the sign and the cue,—
This was the Pompadour's fan!

ENVOY

Where are the secrets it knew?
Weavings of plot and of plan?
—But where is the Pompadour, too?
This was the Pompadour's Fan!

This is Dobson's most successful poem. Sentiment and moral comment are reduced to gentle regret that the graceful pageant fades and leaves only a fan behind. Crisp yet easy rhythms, natural yet exact diction, approximate and unforced rhymes combine to create an appropriate style. Dobson has given disciplined artistic expression to the nostalgia he felt for the age of Louis Quinze. It is irrelevant to protest that the self-consciousness with which he contemplated the scene would have been incomprehensible in the Pompadour's own time, when the monarch himself, on seeing the funeral cortege of his former mistress, merely remarked that madame had a wet day for her journey. Dobson was a Victorian, and he felt as a Victorian.

There was, indeed, a large element of self-consciousness in the entire movement to establish the old French forms in English poetry. To a public instinctively suspicious of anything French, the seminal writings of Banville had made little appeal. As late as the nineties, Andrew Lang wrote that the London Library possessed none of Banville's books and the British Museum but few.¹⁶ The earliest English discussion of the imported forms appears in the notes to Dobson's Proverbs in Porcelain, published in May, 1877. Edmund Gosse followed in the July Cornhill with an elaborate "Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,"¹⁷ while Brander Matthews preached the new techniques to Americans in Appleton's Journal. In 1878 the first anthology of the "exotic forms" appeared; they constituted the final section of W. Davenport Adams' Latter-Day Lyrics. By way of appendix, Dobson contributed a note on "Some Foreign Forms of Verse." With no trace of the self-righteousness which had vitiated Gosse's "Plea," Dobson suggested that

the majority of the forms now in question are not at present suited for, nor are they intended to rival the more approved national rhythms in, the treatment of grave or elevated themes. What is modestly advanced for them (by the present writer at least) is that they may add a new charm of buoyancy,—a lyric freshness,—to amatory and familiar verse, already too much condemned to faded measures and out-worn cadences. Further, upon the assumption that merely graceful or tuneful trifles may be sometimes written (and even read), that they are admirable vehicles for the expression of trifles or jeux d'esprit. They have also a humbler and obscurer use. If, to quote the once-hackneyed, but now too-much-forgotten maxim of Pope—

"Those move easiest that have learned to dance"

what better discipline, among others, could possibly be devised for "those about to versify" than a course of Rondeaux, Triolets, and Ballades?¹⁸

To Austin Dobson in particular,¹⁹ and to his friends Gosse,²⁰ Monkhouse, Lang,²¹ and Henley,²² the natural ization in England of the old measures of Marot, Villon, and Charles d'Orléans is mainly to be ascribed. A few poets and many poetasters hewed to the new metrical line in the decade between Dobson's Proverbs in Porcelain (1877), the first book in which the French forms attracted general notice,²³ and Gleeson White's definitive anthology of Ballades and Rondeaux (1887). Newspapers and magazines of the period bloomed with ballades, rondeaus, and triolets. Dobson had commended their value for the expression of trifles, but even he must have been surprised by the notice which the Puzzle Editor of the weekly, Truth, published shortly after White's anthology appeared:

"Truth" Puzzle, No. 472

Thanks to the efforts of Messrs. Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, and others, Triolets, Ballades, Rondeaux, Vilanelles, and other metrical devices used by Villon and other French poets of the past, have been freely adapted to English verse writing, and I am assured that I shall be setting numerous competitors an agreeable task in asking them to write a rhyming composition on one of the revived French models now so fashionable.

The prize of Two Guineas will accordingly be given for the Best Ballade, written on any Social Subject.²⁴

Politicians aired differences in formal meters and informal language; there are, for instance, numerous unsigned ballades in London, which Henley conducted from 1876 to 1879. The fixed form appealed not only to game editor and political controversialist; it also charmed the barrister and the rustic, the aesthete and the scholar. There were ballades on legal topics in John Popplestone's The Lays of a Limb of the Law (1889), and courtly woodnotes in Thomas Hutchinson's Ballades of a Country Bookworm (1888). When F. H. Hummel, Late Scholar of Worcester College, and A. A. Brodribb of Exeter College, published Lays from Latin Lyres in 1876, the former included among his breezy translations a "Rondeau to Lesbia." And Oscar Wilde, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, during the mid-seventies, enjoyed

days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written; delightful days, in which I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason.²⁵

Yet if there was in the movement a good deal of uncritical infatuation, the men who established the forms were not blind to their inherent shortcomings. Dobson's hopes for them were modest and justified. A large proportion of the important British and American poets have used the French forms as exercises in disciplined expression and as vehicles for humorous and serious themes. Among important British users have been Hardy, Chesterton, Joyce, and Auden; among Americans, Robinson, Pound, Hillyer, and Shapiro. And one of the most popular poems of the First World War, John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," was a rondeau.²⁶ No one has used the forms oftener or with more consistent success than Dobson.²⁷ Perhaps the highest praise ever paid Dobson for his accomplishment came from Henley:

It must be a comfort to you, if you ever have the tooth-ache, to reflect that you have written the three best ballades in English—the "Prose & Rhyme," the "Imitation" & the "Armada;" the best Villanelle, "Seek not O maid"—a really noble work; the two best triolets—"Rose kissed me today," & "O Life's but a dance;" the best rondel, "The Wanderer," & the only readable Chant-Royal.²⁸

Though Dobson became the recognized master of the new importations, it is a mistake to think of him as exclusively and perpetually devoted to them. Actually, fewer than one-third of his poems are written in French forms, and the majority of those were composed in the decade before 1887. Nor did Dobson move indiscriminately among the adopted patterns. He satisfied himself with one attempt each at ballade à double refrain, chant royal, virelai nouveau, and pantoum, and dismissed the rondel and villanelle after half a dozen efforts. He wrote all except one of his triolets in the seventies, and all of his ballades by 1901. Only to the rondeau did he remain faithful to death; in the ten-line form of Villon and the thirteen-line form of Voiture he wrote some forty-four poems, nearly half his exotic verses.

As early as 1878 Dobson began to weary of the importations. On December 14 of that year, when sending Thomas Bailey Aldrich a copy of Latter-Day Lyrics, he wrote:

The volume contains .. . a little "Note" on those "French forms," which I fear have already lived their little day. I myself am tired of them now. I did think that some good rondeaux, and perhaps a few triolets would have been written; but no one really notable has taken them up; while, on the other hand everyone is writing, or has been writing, Ballades in which the archaic and undetachable "Envoi" is (to my mind) an unsurmountable objection to the complete modernization of the form.²⁹

Gosse, Lang, and Henley shared Dobson's disappointment with the showing the forms had made. Gosse predicted that in a little while competent poets would "grow tired of rondeaus and villanelles, and leave them to humbler performers, who will, no doubt, succeed in doing execrable things with them."³⁰ Lang doubted that the revival would "serve the nobler ends of English poetry,"³¹ while Henley "employed the extremely complex villanelle form, merely to demonstrate to the reader that he [was] to expect little or nothing of the villanelle's contents."³²

If the most expert partisans of the forms became diffident of their wares, critics lagged far behind practitioners in enthusiasm for the innovations. When Dobson first collected his experiments in Proverbs in Porcelain (1877), the Athenaeum's Theodore Watts-Dunton delivered a comfortless judgment:

We doubt whether . . . [Mr. Dobson], or even Mr. Swinburne or Mr. Gosse . . . will ever acclimatise here such dainty triflings as the rondeau and the rondel. . . . The temper of the English Muse is against dilettantism; so, perhaps, is the genius of the English language.³³

Six years later Dobson published Old World Idylls, a second volume containing old French forms. Hall Caine,³⁴ in suggesting that Dobson's importations, owing nothing to subject and everything to expression, were unlikely to survive, spoke for the majority of Dobson's readers, who liked poetry in simple metrical forms conveying chaste and tender sentiments, and who suspected that there was something a bit subversive about the use of intricate, and French, forms, even though the poet's heart was apparently pure. From Laureate to laborer, they wanted no "poisonous honey stol'n from France."

Shortly after the White anthology appeared in 1887, Joseph Ashby-Sterry, writing anonymously, published in Punch four poems under the general heading, "The Muse in Manacles." There were "The Ballade (In Bad Weather)," "The Villanelle (With Vexation)," "The Triolet (In a Temper)," and "The Rondeau (In a Rage)."³⁵ H. D. Traill followed in the Universal Review with an article entitled, "The Doom of the Muses," in which he decried the "age of glorified jingle."³⁶ Appropriately enough, the most implacable of critics was the genuine innovator Gerard Manley Hopkins, who broke up the inherited forms of language, fusing them into new possibilities and hammering them into new shapes. His letters to Bridges contain several attacks on the group which he christened "the Rondeliers." When the movement was just beginning, he wrote, "I think the school is too artificial to take root and last, is it not?"³⁷ On Gosse's article in Cornhill he observed, "It seems that triolets and rondels and rondeaus and chants royal and what not and anything but serving God are all the fashion."³⁸ A year later, commenting on the exotic poems in hatter-Day Lyrics, he complained, "Gosse, Dobson and Co. are still fumbling with triolets, villanelles and what not."³⁹ Of White's anthology of 1887 he wrote,

If anything made me think the age Alexandrine . . . an age of decadence .. . well, it would be to see how secondrate poetry (and what I mean is, not poetry at all) gets itself put about for great poetry, and that too when there are plenty of real, however faulty, poets living. I am thinking of people like Alfred Austin and Edwin Arnold and Austin Dobson and Lewis Morris, who have merits of course I know, but . . . you can finish up and I know you will think harder than anything I am likely to write. . . . Mr. Skeat has written, out of pure gall .. . a downright good villanelle in mockery of Villanelle-writing.⁴⁰ If I were Russian censor of the press it would be my joy to force rondeliers to print this piece on the titlepage of each new volume of roundels. There is one of that crew [Henley] has written .. . the very worst line I ever remember to have read in English. It is from a villanelle in praise of the villanelle and says it, the kickshaw in question, cannot reach the roll and swell

Of organs grandiose and sublime
(A dainty thing's the Villanelle)
An effeminate thing: I wish we were rid of them.⁴¹

It was Henley's former friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, who provided the epitaph to "rondeliering." Briefly a "rondelier" himself, he had first turned on the old French poets in articles on Villon and Charles d'Orléans which he submitted to Cornhill in 1876 and 1877,⁴² and then on their English imitators. Upon seeing White's anthology, which had been dedicated to him, he angrily "disaffiliated" himself from the movement. To Henley he wrote, "Damn your Villanelles—and everybody's. . . ."⁴³

It was not surprising that formal verse, soon regarded coolly by master craftsmen like Dobson and Henley, practiced too conscientiously by less expert rhymers, and attacked or ignored by other leading poets of the seventies and eighties, did not retain its first popularity. The chief reason for its decline was, as Saintsbury says, that "no poet had cared or dared, save in a very few cases,⁴⁴ to ease off the syllabic rigidity into that equivalence which is the soul of English verse."⁴⁵ The rondeliers might profitably have followed the practice of Wyatt and Surrey who compensated for the relative scarcity of rhymes in English by creating a sonnet with two more rhymes than its Petrarchan model. At least they should have admitted the justice of the complaint by that early ballade-maker, Geoffrey Chaucer:

And eke to me it ys a gret penaunce,
Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete,
To folowe word by word the curiosite
Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce.⁴⁶

NOTES

¹ Edmund Gosse, "An Appreciation," in Alban Dobson, Austin Dobson: Some Notes (London, 1928), pp. 34-35.

² Edmund Clarence Stedman, Victorian Poets (Boston, 1875), p. 273.

³ Extract of autograph letter dated October 26, 1875, from Dobson to Locker. MS Eng 62, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁴ See William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes (London, 1892), II, 192-93. When Edmund Stedman left England to visit France, Dobson wrote in a farewell letter,

Pray Heaven your lyre take no mischance
In that too-tuneful land of France,—
Especially 'twere well to care,
  If there be "poisonous honey" there. . . .

Quoted in Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York, 1910), II, 24.

⁵ See Austin Dobson's letter on "The Rondeaux of Wyatt the Elder," Athenaeum (1878),¹ 380. For the history of fixed French forms, see Helen Louise Cohen, Lyric Forms from France (New York, 1922).

⁶ Swinburne wrote two early poems which he called "Rondel." (One begins "These many years . . . ," the other, "Kissing her hair.") Neither follows any recognized French model. "A Match" is a series of imperfect triolets, "Ballad of Burdens" an imperfect ballade. In Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878) Swinburne included ten ballades translated from Villon, and in 1883 he brought out A Century of Roundels, a collection of poems in a form Swinburne had adapted from the rondeau.

⁷ There were two ballades ("The Ballade of Dead Ladies" and "His Mother's Service to Our Lady") and a rondeau, "To Death, of His Lady."

⁸ The pantoum is of Malayan rather than French invention. However, Hugo imported it for his Orientales, and Banville reproduced it in Odes funambulesques.

⁹ See Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang (Leicester, 1946), p. 42.

¹⁰ Bridges completed the rondeau, "His poisoned shafts," in July, 1873, his two triolets, "All women born" and "When first we met" in August, 1873. See Albert Guérard, Jr., Robert Bridges (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), Appendix C, pp. 294-95. Dobson recognized Bridges' primacy in the field; to Gosse he wrote September 19, 1876, "Did you know that Bridges' book contains one good Triolet and one very good Rondeau? Alas for all one's little absurdities. His book was published in 1873 (August)." Autograph letter from Dobson to Gosse, I, Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds.

¹¹ Marzials' early experiments in the forms are discussed by Gosse in a letter to Dobson, dated Oct. 11, 1874 (see Evan Charteris, Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse [London, 1931], p. 84), and by Dobson in an undated reply (see Dobson to Gosse, I, Brotherton Collection).

¹² Stevenson, who never published any, and later came to object violently to the forms, wrote two rondels in August, 1875, and sent them from France to his friend Mrs. Sitwell. See Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Colvin (New York, 1911), I, 119-20.

¹³ Monkhouse preceded Gosse as Dobson's closest friend and literary adviser. He read proof on Dobson's early volumes of poetry (his marginalia are on the proof sheets in the Austin Dobson Collection, University of London Library), and his letters (preserved by Dobson's son, Alban Dobson of Bury St. Edmunds) are full of helpful advice on the execution of French forms. For one of Monkhouse's own early rondeaus, see "Violet, delicate, sweet," Spectator, Vol. 59 (1876), p. 273.

¹⁴ During the 1870's there was considerable interest in Villon, greatest of the ballade-makers. In France in 1877 Auguste Longnon brought out the exhaustive Etude Biographique sur François Villon, and Paul Lacroix published Oeuvres de François Villon. In England there were Villon translations by Swinburne, Rossetti, Lang, and Payne; Robert Louis Stevenson's malicious essay, "François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker," Cornhill, Vol. 36 (1877), pp. 215-34; Payne's brilliant introduction, in 1878, to the first complete translation in English; and the founding of the Villon Society.

¹⁵ Dobson completed "Rose-leaves" January 20, 1874. See Manuscript Book of Dobson's Complete Poetical Works, p. 295, University of London Library.

¹⁶ See Andrew Lang, "Théodore de Banville," Essays in Little (London, 1891), p. 51.

¹⁷ Dobson wrote in his notes to Proverbs in Porcelain, p. 200, that Gosse had promised a book on poetic forms. This book never appeared.

¹⁸ Austin Dobson, "A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse," Latter-Day Lyrics (London, 1878), pp. 334-35.

¹⁹ See Cornelius Weygandt, Tuesdays at Ten (Philadelphia, 1928), p. 238.

²⁰ See especially Gosse's New Poems (London, 1879).

²¹ See Lang's XXII Ballades in Blue China (London, 1880) and XXII and X: XXXII Ballades in Blue China (London, 1881). The 1880 collection is dedicated to Dobson. Lang once wrote, "Mr. Dobson, an old offender, debauched my green, unknowing middle age, and I began actually to think in ballades." Andrew Lang, "Cruelty to Poets," Illustrated London News, Vol. 103 (1893), 548.

²² Henley published anonymously many poems in French forms in London, which he edited from 1876 to 1879. See also A Book of Verse (London, 1888).

²³ See W. Davenport Adams, Preface to Latter-Day Lyrics, p. vi.

²⁴ Of the large number of entries, the best were printed in Truth for February 23 and March 8, 1888.

²⁵ Oscar Wilde, "Mr. Pater's Last Volume," Speaker, Vol. 1 (1890), p. 319.

²⁶ For examples of old French poems, consult Adams' Latter-Day Lyrics (1878), White's Ballades and Rondeaus (1887), Helen Louise Cohen's Lyric Forms from France (New York, 1922), and a British anthology, to which Chesterton was the heaviest contributor, entitled One Hundred and One Ballades (1931).

²⁷ Cornelius Weygandt remarks of the experimenters in French forms that "it was the fate of Dobson to win the widest hearing" (Tuesdays at Ten, p. 237). Henley called the White anthology "above all remarkable as a monument to Mr. Austin Dobson" (Critic [N.Y.], Vol. 11 [1887], p. 260). See also Cosmo Monkhouse's review, Academy, Vol. 32 (1887), pp. 246-47.

²⁸ Extract of autograph letter, undated, from Henley to Dobson (preserved by Mr. Alban Dobson).

²⁹ Extract of autograph letter dated Dec. 14, 1878, from Dobson to Thomas Bailey Aldrich (T. B. Aldrich Letter File, *42M-1836 [1327], Houghton Library, Harvard).

³⁰ "Latter-Day Lyrics," Athenaeum (1878)¹, 406.

³¹Essays in Little, p. 75.

³² Jerome Hamilton Buckley, William Ernest Henley (Princeton, 1945), p. 85.

³³Athenaeum (1877)¹, 761. Though the review is unsigned, Watts-Dunton's name appears in the marked file preserved in the office of the New Statesman and Nation.

³⁴ See Athenaeum (1883)², 563-64. Also unsigned; Caine identified by New Statesman file.

³⁵ See Punch, Vol. 93 (1887), p. 192. Ashby-Sterry is identified as the author in Walter Hamilton, comp., Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (London, 1889), VI, 61.

³⁶Universal Review, Vol. 2 (1888), p. 507.

³⁷ Extract of letter, dated May 13, 1877, quoted in Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Abbott (London, 1935), p. 188.

³⁸ Extract of letter, dated Aug. 8, 1877, quoted in Letters, p. 43.

³⁹ Extract of letter, dated April 2, 1878, quoted in Letters, p. 49.

⁴⁰ See Walter W. Skeat, "Villanelle," Academy, Vol. 33 (1888), p. 343.

⁴¹ Letter dated May 25, 1888, quoted in Letters, pp. 275-77.

⁴² See R.L.S., "Charles of Orleans," Cornhill, Vol. 34 (1876), pp. 695-717, and "François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker," Cornhill, Vol. 36 (1877), pp. 215-34.

⁴³Works (New York, 1901), XXVII, 235.

⁴⁴ For instance, Swinburne, in A Century of Roundels (1883).

⁴⁵ George Saintsbury, "The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century," Cambridge History of English Literature, XIII (Cambridge, 1916), 254.

⁴⁶ "The Complaint of Venus," Complete Poetical Works, ed. Robinson (Boston, 1933), p. 634.