Mr. Austin Dobson Talks About His Contemporaries Mr. Austin Dobson, poet, essayist, and literary historian, has just celebrated his eighty-first birth With Mr. Frederic Harrison, Me lay, Thomas Hardy, and Viscount Morley, he makes up a great quartette of Victorian veteran men of letters who are still with us.
r. Dobson published his first volume of poems in 1873; "At the Sign of the Lyre" was issued in 1885.
A special correspondent of the "Times" has been given a remarkable interview by Mr. Dobson, who for many years has lived a clo tered life at Ealing, and virtually confined to one room, owing to ill-health, for the last 20 years He spoke of the praise Robert Browning bestowed on his first book. He met Browning only once in the flesh, but this book of poems wag sent to him by a mutual acquaintance, and he bestowed ungrudging praise on it. This encouragement from an established Olympian to a struggler on the slopes of Parnassus greatly stimula:- ed Mr. Dobson. The book, which was published in 1873, brought him yet another friend. Mr, Dobson met Lord Tennyson some half-di times. "He way a wonderfully picturesque figure and a very great talker," he said. "He had the advantage that he did not confine his conversation to poetry."
Dickens AND THACKERAY.
Mr. Dobson also met Stevenson, Henley, and Andrew Long. Stevenson he knew only slightly, but he expressed great admiration for the works of Andrew Lang—in spite of his "incomparable journalistic instinct."
About the Victorian novelists Mr. Dobson was eloquent. Dickens and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.