sake, to art and beauty and feeling; and this in no spirit of preciosity, but as a departure from—though not a revolt against-the moralizing and reformatory propaganda, howsoever great in purpose and achievement, of the venerated "elder bards."

AN

XIV

AUSTIN DOBSON 1

N usher at the drawing-room door serves as a foil to the courtly groups beyond him. All his bows and flourishes seem commonplace beside the easy grace of his betters, if, indeed, the guests vouchsafe him a glance as they pass within. Little they care whether his legs be cross-gartered. Still, the usher is thought to be, in his way, a useful personage. And an introduction to these Vignettes in Rhyme thus may bear a certain fitness,-lest otherwise the collection should lack that effect which some prosaic contrast may lend to the delicate art of the whole.

Once acquainted with these pages, the reader will find that my comparison is an apt one; that he is in good company, and that Mr. Dobson, more than other recent poets, seems not only to gather about him a select concourse of fine people, but to move at ease among them. It is a pleasure to meet these gentlefolk, and like a mark of our own rank. Here are gathered, it is true, those of various periods and manners, but all demean themselves with graceful breeding and without affectation, and are on good terms with one another and with their host. Here are the old noblesse,

1 Introduction to Vignettes in Rhyme, and Other Verses. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1880.

the beau sabreur, the gentleman and gentlewoman of the old school, and here the youths and maidens of to-day, a choice assemblage, with not a prig, a bore, or a vulgarian among them.

Some of the most attractive portions of this selection, therefore, have to do with the quaint people of a time gone by, and with the treasures they have bequeathed to us. But the author is an artist of the present, and his work a product of to-day. Its modernism is a constant charm. There are in England and France so many lovely relics of a refined, alluring age! In England, the canvases of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, the old houses with their souvenirs of teacup-times, brocade and chintz, deftly garnished mantels, tapestried and lavendered chambers, box-bordered lawns and garden-plots. In France, the dark hangings and polished floors of stately mirrored rooms in turreted châteaux and peaked mansions. Never so much as now have the artists availed themselves of these materials, and of the riches of galleries and museums close at hand. But one looks to the poet to catch the sense and soul of these things, the aroma that clings about them. The fashions that most readily appeal to Mr. Dobson are those which are so far bygone as to be again desired and new. What more odious than the mode we have just discarded? What so winning as that of a time earlier than our memory, and thoroughly good in its time? The movement which has given expression to all this, on both sides of the ocean, is like a new taste. Mr. Dobson is the instinctive and born interpreter of its sentiment, and

his Vignettes in Rhyme will be as welcome to us as they have been to his own people. The actor's art delights us, because we know it is not real, and the modern renaissance delights us, because it gives us something quite apart from our common humdrum life; it is a feeling of to-day that dallies with the fragments of the past,—of that Past which never is past, which merges with the Present, and retains a hold upon our works of every-day use and beauty.

I write first of Mr. Dobson's old-time sentiment, because it is so definite and effective, but his muse is not restricted to a single range. Before looking farther, let us see who is this artist that has filled the vacant niche, and whose verse shows at once the strength and fineness that make it rank with the selectest poetry of our day.

Not unlike others who live at will in an ideal world, Austin Dobson is as modest and unassuming a person as one often meets. Just a poet, scholar and gentleman, the artist-side of whose nature compensates him for any lack of adventure in his daily work and walk. As is the case with many London authors, an office in the Civil Service has supplied him with an honorable certainty of livelihood and left his heart at ease for song. He was born in 1840, and has been a government-clerk for twenty-two years. Singularly enough, he did not begin to write poetry till he was twentyfive years of age, and the first collection of his Vignettes was not made until 1874. From the outset he took the public taste with the delicate sense and humor of his lyrics, no less than by their finish

and ideality. We reasonably may surmise that years of growth, study, observation, lay behind this good fortune.

My own attention, I remember, first was drawn to his work by the neatest and brightest of society-verse, composed in a novel style, quite unlike that of Praed, Locker, or his earlier predecessors. I have elsewhere described poems of this class as "those patrician rhymes, which, for want of an English equivalent, are termed vers de société. . . . This is pervaded by an indefinable grace that elevates it to the region of poetic art, and owing to which the lightest ballads of Suckling and Waller are current to this day. In fine, the true kind is marked by humor, by spontaneity, joined with extreme elegance of finish, by the quality we call breeding,—above all, by lightness of touch." All of these essentials were present in "Tu Quoque," "An Autumn Idyll," and in other pieces which at once brought Mr. Dobson into favor. Some of them are so witty and elegant, surrounded by so fine an atmosphere, and withal so true to the feeling and scenery of his own island, as to make him seem like a modern Horace or Theocritus, or like both in one. He is not the first poet that has been called an English Horace, but few have better merited the title. He draws his Englishmen as Horace drew his town and country friends. It seems to me that he is the sketcher to whom Thackeray would take a liking. Since the De Floracs, we have had no such French people as L'Etoile and Monsieur Vieuxbois; since Esmond and his times, no such people of the old England have