Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/139

 quoting texts from Daniel and the Revelation. This popular speech was published by Dobbs as ‘Substance of a Speech delivered in the Irish House of Commons 7 June 1800, in which is predicted the second coming of the Messiah,’ and he took advantage of the attention he had attracted to publish in the same year his ‘Concise View of the Great Predictions in the Sacred Writings,’ and his ‘Summary of Universal History,’ in nine volumes, on which he had been long engaged. With the passing of the Act of Union Dobbs sank into obscurity; he could not get any more of his books published, his circumstances became embarrassed, his eccentricities increased to madness, and he died in great pecuniary difficulties on 11 April 1811.



DOBELL, SYDNEY THOMPSON (1824–1874), poet and critic, born 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, was the eldest son of John Dobell, author of a remarkable pamphlet, ‘Man unfit to govern Man,’ and a daughter of Samuel Thompson, known in his day as a leader of reforming movements in the city of London. His father, a wine merchant, removed in 1836 from Kent to Cheltenham, where the poet maintained, with various degrees of activity, till his death, his connection with the business and the district. Sydney, whose precocious juvenile verses had already attracted notice, was, with results in some respects unfortunate, educated by private tutors and his own study, and never went to either school or university. To this fact he makes an interesting reference in the course of some humorous lines on Cheltenham College, which date from his eighteenth year. At home he was overworked, especially overstrained by the fervour of inherited religious zeal, and his genius, in the absence of social checks, soon showed a tendency to eccentricity of expression, from which in later life he partially, but never entirely, shook himself free. From first to last he lived more among the heights of an ideal world than the beaten paths of life. Hence the elevation and the limitations of his work. His training during this crucial period made him a varied, but prevented him from becoming a precise, scholar, a result patent alike in his prose and verse.

In 1839 he became engaged to a daughter of George Fordham of Odsey House, Cambridge; in 1844 they were married, and were never, as stated in Dobell's biography, thirty hours apart during the thirty years of their union. The early period of their wedded life was divided between residence at Cheltenham and country places among the hills. A meeting at one of these, Coxhorn House, in the valley of Charlton Kings, with Mr. Stansfield and Mr. George Dawson, is said to have originated the Society of the Friends of Italy. Previously, at Hucclecote, on the Via Arminia, he had begun ‘The Roman,’ which appeared in 1850, under the pseudonym of Sydney Yendys. Inspired by the stirring events of the time, this dramatic poem, from its intrinsic merit and its accord with a popular enthusiasm, had a rapid and decided success, and while establishing his reputation enlarged the circle of the author's friends, among whom were numbered leading writers like Tennyson and Carlyle, artists like Holman Hunt and Rossetti, prominent patriots like Mazzini and Kossuth. The poet's devotion to the cause of ‘the nationalities’—Italian, Hungarian, Spanish—never abated; it remained, as evinced by one of his latest fragments, ‘Mentana,’ a link between his adolescent radical and his mature liberal-conservative politics. Shortly afterwards Dobell's elaborate and appreciative criticism of Currer Bell in ‘The Palladium’ led to an interesting correspondence between the two authors. The August of 1850 he spent in North Wales, the following summer in Switzerland, and their mountain scenery left an impress on all his later work. ‘Balder,’ finished in 1853 at Amberley Hill, was with the general public and the majority of critics less fortunate than ‘The Roman.’ It is harder to read, as it was harder to write. The majority of readers, in search of pleasure and variety, recoiled from its violences, were intolerant of its monotony, and misunderstood the moral of its painful plot. The book is incomplete, as it stands a somewhat chaotic fragment of an unfulfilled design, but it exhibits the highest flights of the author's imagination and his finest pictures of Nature. The descriptions of Chamouni, of the Coliseum, of spring, and of the summer's day on the hill, almost sustain the comparisons which they provoke. To most readers ‘Balder’ will remain a portent, but it has stamina for permanence as a mine for poets.

In 1854 Dobell went to Edinburgh to seek medical advice for his wife, and during the next three years resided in Scotland, spending the winters in the capital, the summers in the highlands. During this period he made the acquaintance, among others, of Mr. Hunter of Craigcrook, Dr. Samuel Brown, Dr. John Brown, Edward Forbes, W. E. Aytoun, Sir Noel Paton, Mr. Dallas, and Sir David Brewster. In conjunction with Alexander Smith, to whom he was united in close ties of literary brotherhood, he issued in 1855 a series