Henry Austin Dobson, the son of Mr. George Clarisse Dobson, a civil engineer, was born in Plymouth, England, January 18th 1840. His early years were spent in Anglesea, and after receiving his education in Beaumaris, Coventry, and Strasburg, he returned to England to become a civil engineer. In 1856 he entered the civil service of Great Britain, and ever since that date he has held offices in the Board of Trade. His leisure was devoted to literature, and when Anthony Trollope first issued his magazine St. Paul's in 1868, he introduced to the public the verse of Austin Dobson. In 1873 his fugitive poems were published in a small volume entitled 'Vignettes in Rhyme' and 'Vers de Société.' This was followed in 1877 by 'Proverbs in Porcelain,' and both books, with additional poems, were printed again in two volumes: 'Old World Idylls' (1883), and 'At the Sign of the Lyre' (1885). Mr. Dobson's original essays are contained in three volumes: 'Four Frenchwomen,' studies of Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, the Princess de Lamballe, and Madame de Genlis (1890), and 'Eighteenth-Century Vignettes' (first series 1892, second series 1894), which touch upon a host of picturesque and fascinating themes. He has written also several biographies: of Hogarth, of Fielding, of Steele (1886), of Goldsmith (1888), and a 'Memoir of Horace Walpole' (1890). He has also written felicitous critical introductions to many new editions of the eighteenth-century classics. Austin Dobson has been most happy in breathing English life into the old poems of French verse, such as ballades, villanelles, roundels, and rondeaux; and he has also written clever and satirical fables, cast in the form and temper of Gay and Prior, with quaint obsolete affectations, redolent of the classic age of Anne. So serious is his attitude towards art, and so large his audience, that the hope expressed in the following rondeau will certainly be realized:-- In after days, when grasses high O'er-top the stone where I shall lie, Though ill or well the world adjust My slender claim to honored dust, I shall not question nor reply. I shall not see the morning sky, I shall not hear the night-wind sigh; I shall be mute, as all men must, In after days. But yet, now living, fain were I That some one then should testify, Saying--_He held his pen in trust_ _To Art, not serving shame or lust._ Will none?--Then let my memory die In after days! [Illustration: Signature (Esther Singleton)] ON A NANKIN PLATE VILLANELLE "Ah me, but it might have been! Was there ever so dismal a fate?" Quoth the little blue mandarin. "Such a maid as was never seen: She passed, tho' I cried to her, 'Wait,'-- Ah me, but it might have been! "I cried, 'O my Flower, my Queen, Be mine!'--'Twas precipitate," Quoth the little blue mandarin. "But then ... she was just sixteen,-- Long-eyed, as a lily straight,-- Ah me, but it might have been!