Recognized in the nineteenth century as, in Francis Edwin Murray's words, "the lineal descendant of [Joseph] Addison, [Oliver] Goldsmith, and [Thomas] Gray," Austin Dobson adumbrates the present-day university professor who specializes in a literary period--in Dobson's case, the eighteenth century. Dobson, however, was not a professor but a clerk at the Board of Trade, and he first achieved notice as a writer--although he later chafed against the designation--of vers de société. Edmund Gosse claimed that Dobson achieved the widest "circulation" and the greatest "popularity" of any "English verse-writer of his immediate generation." But Dobson probably had his greatest impact on British society with The Civil Service Handbook of English Literature (1874) and in his contributions to The Civil Service History of England (1870). These books, designed to prepare young men for examinations for civil-service positions, reflect nineteenth-century assumptions about the broad relevance of literary study; they also...