A binding case for The London Mercury is being prepared, and will, we hope, be ready when the first volume (of six numbers) is complete. It would be a convenience if readers who are preserving their sets and will desire the official binding (which we can promise will not be an offensive one) would let us know in advance by postcard so that we may have some basis for our first order of cases.
For some time after publication we were obliged to refuse orders for our first number. We have recovered a very few copies, and, as we prefer that they should go to persons who are really anxious to obtain them in order to complete sets, we offer them at 7s. 6d. a copy. Applications will be dealt with in the order in which they are received. No. 2 will shortly follow suit.
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.