SOURCE: "Austin Dobson and the Rondeliers," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1, March, 1953, pp. 31-42.

In the following essay, Robinson discusses Dobson's use of the rondeau poetic form.

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick.

—Edgar Lee Masters

In April, 1874, a young man from the Printed Books Department at the British Museum attended a meeting of the Pen and Pencil Club at the home of the Hon. Peter Taylor, Radical M. P. for Leicester and proprietor of the Examiner. After several readers had led Edmund Gosse to believe he was in the very empire of Dullness,

a slim young man, with dark eyes beneath a fine Horatian forehead, rose and read a short piece, in a voice attractive in its modesty and distinction. This, a whisper told me, was Mr. Austin Dobson, whose Vignettes in Rhyme had recently attracted a good deal of...