SOURCE: "Austin Dobson," in Studies in Prose and Verse, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1904, pp. 224-9.

In the following essay, Symons praises Dobson's work, but notes that his poetry employing earlier poetic forms and subjects is superior to his modern works.

The qualities of Mr Austin Dobson's work are known, for, by an accident which sometimes comes to surprise even the most disinterested of workers, his work is popular. Many have even paid him the compliment, from their own point of view, of ranking him, as a poet, with those amiable, intelligent, often scholarly persons, such as Mr Locker-Lampson, who have made facile verses about books and wines on the afternoons when they were at leisure. He has written, it is true, a good deal of vers de société, some of which he frankly acknowledges on the head-lines; and to distinguish between light verse, which is poetry, and...