For about a hundred years the name of Dibdin was a pleasant name in the ears and eyes of the English people. The Dibdin proper, son of a silversmith, was born at Southampton in the year of the Scotch Rebellion, 1745. The event belongs almost to ancient history, but there are men not yet so very old who can remember in their childhood the once ‘tuneful Charley,’ who became for ever mute in the year 1814. The name is a local one. There is a place called Dibden (originally Deep Dene), a place of some importance at the time of the Conquest, situated in a thickly wooded dell in Southampton Water. Charles Dibdin was Hampshire born and Hampshire bred. His father, silversmith and parish clerk, sent him to Winchester School, but he was more especially of the Winchester Cathedral choir. He was ‘intended for the Church,’ as the phrase goes, but instead of a bishop writing charges, he became a composer arranging musical scores. In the Church he probably would have written a few indifferent sermons. On and for the stage, and the world, he penned and melodised hundreds of popular songs. Some of these are as good as sermons; others are as unintelligible; there are many of them that are infinitely better. Dibdin knew as much about a ship as many curates know about religion; and now and then he got into the same sort of mess accordingly. On the whole, however, he pulled through successfully. The backbone of all his songs was ‘loyalty.’ It was like insisting on ‘faith’ in sermons. He perhaps would have been a popular preacher, had he not preferred being a popular song-writer--Tyrtæus instead of Calchas. Charles Dibdin was neither sailor nor parson, but the family was destined to contribute both to the wide-apart professions respectively. Charles had an elder brother who took to sea and became captain of an East Indiaman. Years after, but in the same year, 1775, a son was born to each, and each son was named Thomas. The captain’s son was born at Calcutta. He was put to the law with the object of making a Lord Chancellor of him, but the young fellow turned to the Church, and did not become an archbishop. Nevertheless, he is well remembered as the Rev. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, author of the ‘Bibliomania,’ the ‘Biographical Decameron,’ and many other works of a similar nature. The Rev. Thomas died, a popular preacher, rector of St. Mary’s, Bryanstone Square, in 1847.