SOURCE: "Dobson: Method and Effect," in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation, David Nutt, 1890, pp. 121-3.

In the following essay, Henley compares Dobson to Horace and eighteenth-century English poets.

His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisite clarity. Of its kind it is as nearly as possible perfect. You think of Horace as you read; and you think of those among our own eighteenth century poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. The epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the noun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect of it all is that 'something has here got itself uttered,' and for good...