Henry Austin Dobson

In 1868, he married Frances Mary, daughter of the distinguished civil engineer Nathaniel Beardmore (1816–1872) of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and settled at Ealing.

It was not until 1868 that the appearance of St Paul's, a magazine edited by Anthony Trollope, gave Harry Dobson an opportunity and an audience; and during the next six years he contributed some of his favourite poems, including "Tu Quoque," "A Gentleman of the Old School," "A Dialogue from Plato," and "Une Marquise."

Swinburne's bold excursions into classical metre had broken new ground; it was hopeless to attempt to compete, and the poets of the day were looking for fresh forms and variations.

Dobson, who had already made successful use of the triolet, was at the head of this movement, and in May 1876 he published in The Prodigals the first original ballade written in English.

An article in The Cornhill Magazine by Edmund Gosse, "A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse", appearing in July 1877, simultaneously with Dobson's second volume, Proverbs in Porcelain, drew the general eye to the possibilities and achievements of the movement.

By this time his taste was gradually settling on the period with which it has since become almost exclusively associated; and the spirit of the 18th century was revived in "The Ballad of Beau Brocade" and in "The Story of Rosina", as nowhere else in modern English poetry.

The admirably fresh and breezy "Ladies of St James's" has precisely the qualities we have traced in his other 18th-century poems; there are ballades and rondeaus, with all the earlier charm; and in "A Revolutionary Relic", as in "The Child Musician" of the Old-World Idylls, the poet reaches a depth of true pathos which he does not often attempt, but in which, when he seeks it, he never fails.

His biographies of Henry Fielding (1883), Thomas Bewick (1884), Richard Steele (1886), Oliver Goldsmith (1888), Horace Walpole (1890) and William Hogarth (1879-1891-1897-1902-1907) are studies marked alike by assiduous research, sympathetic presentation and sound criticism.

In Four Frenchwomen (1890), in the three series of Eighteenth-Century Vignettes (1892-1894-1896), and in The Paladin of Philanthropy (1899), which contain unquestionably his most delicate prose work, the accurate detail of each study is relieved by a charm of expression which could only be attained by a poet.