DOBSON, HENRY AUSTIN (1840-1921), English poet and man of letters, was born at Plymouth and educated at Beau maris, Coventry, and the Strasbourg gymnase. In Dec. 1856 he entered the board of trade, and from 1884 to 19or, when he re tired, was a principal clerk in the marine department of that office. In 1873 he collected the poems which had appeared in various periodicals in a volume entitled Vignettes in Rhyme. In 1875 ap peared At the Sign of the Lyre, which contained "The Ladies of St. James's," "The Old Sedan Chair," "My Books," and the de lightful "Fables of Literature and Art." The book has the flavour of the ath century which Dobson loved so well, and of which he has left exquisite pictures in prose as well as in verse. Dobson led the movement in the late '7os for the introduction of French forms, the ballade, the triolet, and the rondeau, forms which he used in his Proverbs in Porcelain (1877). Vignettes in Rhyme and Proverbs in Porcelain, combined in one volume, were printed in the United States as Vignettes in Rhyme (188o), and with some addi tions as Old World Idylls (1883) in England. After 1885 Dobson was engaged principally upon critical and biographical prose. His biographies of Fielding (1883), Bewick (1884), Steele (1886), Goldsmith (1888), W alpole (189o), Hogarth (1879-98), Samuel Richardson (19o2), and Fanny Burney (19o3) are studies marked alike by assiduous research, sympathetic presentation and sound criticism. Dobson always added something, and often a great deal, to our positive knowledge of the subject in question, his work as a critic never being solely aesthetic. Four Frenchwomen (189o), the three series of Eighteenth-Century Vignettes and The Paladin of Philanthropy (1899), contain unquestionably his most delicate prose work. In 19oI he collected his hitherto unpublished poems in a volume entitled Carmina V otiva.
See Alban Dobson, Austin Dobson, Some Notes (1928) .