Excerpt from Old-World Idylls: And Other Verses Not unlike others who live at will in an ideal world, Austin Dobson is as modest and unassuming a person as one often meets. Just a poet, scholar and gentle man, the artist-side of whose nature compensates him for any lack of adventure in his daily work and walk. As is the case with many London authors, an Office in the Civil Service has supplied him with an honorable certainty of livelihood and left his heart at ease for song. He was born in 1840, and has been a govern ment-clerk for twenty-two years. Singularly enough, he did not begin to write poetry till he was twenty-five years Of age, and the first collection of his Vignettes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.