LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
WE congratulate Mr. Austin Dobson, whose birthday was the eighteenth of last month, on arriving at the full age of eighty. He has lived, for the past twenty years, since his retirement from the public service, so noiselessly that an idle world, always attentive to sensation, has half-forgotten to regard his presence. He has always preferred to stand a little out of the limelight, being by nature unobtrusive, and more conversant with books than with men. Such serene natures miss some of the rewards of their own age, but when they possess the quality of Mr. Austin Dobson posterity gives them their revenge. No one in our time has pursued the profession of literature with a more disinterested fervour than he. Mr. Dobson has taken no part in controversy, he has been mixed up with no sensational "movements"; his whole thought has been fixed on the study of past times and on the perfecting of his own delicate and lapidary art. He was not precocious in his development. When his earliest volume of poems, Vignettes in Rhyme, appeared he had reached his thirty-fourth year. He did not venture upon prose until eleven years later, when he published his memoir of Thomas Bewick. His latest volume, A Bookman's Budget, of 1917, combined both arts in one.
The quality of Mr. Austin Dobson, both in verse and prose, is curiously out of sympathy with the general tendency of literature to-day. In prose—though we admit that his essays have had numerous and distinguished admirers, Mr. Balfour, if we remember right, having once praised them above his poems in the House of Commons—in prose he seems to us to sacrifice freedom of movement to an intensely meticulous accuracy and to a desire to leave no fact unrecorded. But in verse Mr. Austin Dobson is, in his own restricted field, unsurpassed. He carries on, through the second half of the nineteenth century, the tradition of Prior and Anstey and Praed. It may be said that his poems are metrical pastimes, but he lifts them to the dignity of poetry. His happiest pieces are so polished, so delicate, and so felicitous that not a word in them could be altered; they are, of their own kind, perfect, and perfection is not relative but positive. So long as the English language survives there will be readers of The Ballad of Beau Brocade. We wish Mr. Austin Dobson many more years, and we hope that he will yet be encouraged to give us specimens of his graceful penmanship.
The writers of the obituary notices of Sir William Osler were strangely silent as to the love of books which was one of his most marked characteristics, and this although in Who's Who? he had put down "Bibliography" as his only "Recreation," and at the time of his death had been President of the Bibliographical Society for seven years, nearly three times as long as any of his predecessors. In the true spirit of humanism his interest in bibliography was first aroused by the books relating to his own profession, and widened out from this to a fine catholicity. Within a year of his coming to England he delivered an address on Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici before the Physical Society of Guy's Hospital (printed in The Library for January, 1906), and he was never tired of singing the praise of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as "a great medical treatise (the greatest ever written by a layman), orderly in arrangement, intensely serious in purpose, and weighty beyond belief in authorities." The quotation comes from a paper he read before the Bibliographical Society on The Library of Robert Burton in November, 1909, in which he gave a summarised account of the 580 books of Burton's preserved at the Bodleian and the 429 in the library at Christ Church. Unless we are mistaken, the picking out of these books, and the grouping those at Christ Church round a portrait of Burton, copied from the original in Brasenose College, was due mainly to his initiative. He certainly took a keen interest in both libraries, was an enthusiastic curator of the Bodleian, and a generous supporter of the admirable Bodleian Quarterly, started by Mr. Falconer Madan. A paper he contributed to this on the Bookworm, illustrated by an admirable coloured plate exhibiting it in all its stages, is by far the best study of that elusive "worm" ever printed.
After he became President of the Bibliographical Society he gave another stimulating address on the medical books printed before the close of the year 1480, its object being "to get an idea of the mental attitude of the profession of medicine from the character of the books printed." He had then been working on this subject for some time, and even amid the countless activities into which he threw himself during the war did not wholly neglect it. The description of the books was practically finished some time ago; whether the introduction, in which he aimed at clothing the bibliographical skeleton with flesh and blood, had been written is not yet known. He had over forty medical books of the fifteenth century in his own collection, and was forming a specialist library to illustrate the history of science, and of medicine in particular, on a strikingly original plan. Its completion should have been the occupation of a leisurely old age, but he loved his fellows too well to give himself any leisure, and left this for others to complete.
We welcome from America the first number of the new Dial. The Dial was founded at Chicago in 1880 by Francis F. Browne. Until a few years ago it remained in the Browne family, who produced fortnightly a paper, sober, academic, and informative, somewhat resembling our Athenæum of Victorian days. A few years ago the paper changed hands: its offices were shifted to New York, and it has been at one time primarily an organ of rebellious literary youth, and at another a Radical political journal. The latest remodelling promises stability. The Dial appears as a purely literary and artistic monthly, in shape like one of our own monthly reviews, and typographically superior to most of them. We await its development with interest.