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DIB Circus (now the Surrey) was built for him, and he was appointed manager for life, with a fourth of the profits; but, after three years of bickering, he dissolved the connection. For the next few years his position was precarious. he tried novel-writing and started a periodical. At last resolving to yield to the pressing solicitations of his nautical brother, then in India, and to try his fortune in the east, in 1788 he had actually sailed; but the vessel was driven back by adverse winds to Torbay, and Dibdin abandoned his Indian scheme. It was at Torbay that he gave the first of those musical entertainments, which—continued under various titles and in various places when he returned to London—educed from him some of his most popular songs. The national importance of these, and their effect on the public mind in general and the nautical mind in particular, was recognized by the government, and he received in 1803 a pension of £200 a year, which was revoked, however, by Lord Grenville, during his short-lived premiership. In 1808 Dibdin returned to professional life, and at the same time started a music-shop, but the result of his new efforts was bankruptcy. In 1810, by public subscription, a small annuity was purchased for him, and on this he vegetated until his death on the 25th of July, 1814. The best edition of his songs is that (containing more than a thousand of them) published in 1843 by Mr. George Hogarth, the well-known musical critic. In the memoir which accompanied it Mr. Hogarth gives an interesting personal reminiscence of Dibdin, at one of whose entertainments he had been present when a boy, and he describes Dibdin as "a handsome man of middle size, with an open pleasing countenance, and a very gentlemanlike manner and address." Ample details of Dibdin's biography are furnished in his memoir of himself, published in 1803. with the title of "Professional Life."—F. E.  DIBDIN,, eldest son of Charles, and, like his father, a prolific composer of plays and songs, was born on the 21st of March, 1771. Garrick was his godfather; and, at four years old, he made his appearance in public as Cupid in the pageant of Shakspeare's jubilee. He received a liberal education, but, strangely enough, was apprenticed to an upholsterer, and at the age of eighteen quitted the uncongenial occupation for the life of an actor and play-wright. Of his innumerable pieces, few keep possession of the stage; among the few are the opera of the "Cabinet," and the farce of "Past Ten o'clock." Thomas Dibdin's dramatic industry was of a very miscellaneous kind. It is recorded in theatrical chronicles, that his pantomime of "Mother Goose" brought £20,000 to the treasury of Covent Garden, and his equestrian piece, the "High-Mettled Racer," £13,000 to that of Astley's. In spite of this, his last years were spent in comparative indigence. He died on the 16th of September, 1841, and was preparing at the time of his decease, by order of the admiralty, a complete edition of his father's sea-songs, which was published in the following year.—F. E.  DIBDIN,, D.D., the most enthusiastic of British bibliographers, was born at Calcutta in 1776. He was the nephew of Dibdin the celebrated writer of naval songs, and his father was the "poor Tom Bowling" of Charles' well-known and pathetic ditty. The elder Dibdin, a joyous, restless, fiddle-playing son of the sea, had been an officer in the merchant service, and tried to improve his fortunes in the east. His son describes him as "a rover on the Indian ocean;" but, towards the close of his life, he quitted the mercantile marine for the position, on terra firma, of "master-attendant at Nagore," in the Company's service. Returning to Europe with their little son, the future bibliographer, then a child of four, both parents died before they reached England, and the orphan was taken charge of by a brother of his mother's, a lawyer. Educated at various schools in the neighbourhood of London, he was sent to St. John's college, Oxford, where his reading was more discursive than profound. Two of his favourite books were Boswell's Life of Johnson, and D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. He left college without a degree, was entered at Lincoln's inn with a view to the bar, and placed for a time in the chambers of Basil Montague, the editor of Bacon. Instead of practising at the metropolitan bar, he started as a provincial counsel at Worcester, but after a short time exchanged law for the church, and was ordained in the December of 1804. He removed to Kensington, and thenceforth divided his time between the duties of his profession and literature. So early as 1796 he had published a little volume of poems, and had afterwards contributed to periodicals and produced a few compilations, but his first work of any note was in his own department of bibliography "An Introduction to the knowledge of the rare and valuable editions of the Latin and Greek classics," which appeared in 1803. Compared with some continental manuals of the same kind, this is a very superficial performance; but it supplied, in some degree, a want existing at the time of its publication, and, indeed, it held its ground for many years, a fourth edition appearing in 1827. It was the means too of introducing the author to the notice of the book-collecting Earl Spencer, a connection which proved in more than one way of great importance. Dr. Dibdin's first clerical preferment was the preachership of Archbishop Tenison's chapel, but his mainstay for many years was a preachership at a chapel at Brompton. In 1823 Lord Spencer gave him the living of Exning in Sussex, and through his influence with Lord Liverpool, then premier, procured for him the rectorship of St. Mary's, Bryanstone Square, which he continued to hold till his death. The valuable library at Althorp was also thrown open to him, and to Lord Spencer's patronage Dibdin owed many of his bibliographical opportunities. The "Introduction to the Classics" was a sober, serious, business-like production. The first work in which he treated of bibliography with the semi-earnestness, semi-sportiveness which afterwards made him famous, was a thin octavo, the "Bibliomania," addressed to Mr. Reginald Heber, the well-known book-collector, and published in 1809. Meanwhile he had been lecturing on English literature at the Royal Institution (1806, 1808), editing a work of Quarles in 1807, and a reprint of the first English version of Sir Thomas More's Utopia in 1808. In 1810 appeared the first volume of what ought to have been his magnum opus—his edition of Ames' Typographical Antiquities, projected on a vast scale. Herbert's edition had begun to appear in 1785, and from the materials left by Herbert, and afforded by the progress of bibliography, there was ample room for a new and greatly improved edition of Ames' work. By the first volume Dibdin cleared £600. The second volume appeared in 1812, the third in 1816, the fourth not till 1819, by which time the original subscribers were either dead or wearied of the delay. The fourth volume, according to the editor's own confession, fell still-born from the press, and six more would have been required to complete the work on its original scale. The prospect was not encouraging, and the enterprise was dropped. Dibdin's Herbert's Ames remains a fragment, but one which, with all its needless discursiveness and frequent irrelevancy of added matter, constitutes a very important contribution to British bibliography. The year after the publication of the first volume of his edition of Ames, appeared (1811) his expanded and reconstructed edition of the "Bibliomania." The thin volume was now much enlarged in its dimensions, and instead of a letter to Mr. Heber, it announced itself as "A Bibliographical Romance." Its form was that of dialogue. Heber, Douce, George Chalmers, Malone, were introduced under fictitious names, as interlocutors. Bibliography became not merely a science, but a passion, which a certain Shandean humour in the treatment prevented from seeming to be ridiculous. The idea was afterwards carried out more completely in the "Bibliographical Decameron;" but the "Bibliomania" long retained its early popularity, and went through several editions, the latest of them appearing so recently as 1842. The year of the hit made by the publication of the reconstructed "Bibliomania," was also that of Dibdin's first visit to Althorp; 1812 forms another great era in the history of British bibliography and the biography of Dibdin. It was the year of the famous Roxburgh sale, when the marquis of Blandford (afterwards duke of Marlborough) contested the purchase of a Boccaccio with Earl Spencer, the latter only triumphing by bidding the enormous sum of £2260—a scene chronicled in his best manner by Dibdin, in a passage which will be quoted so long as bibliography survives. It was this famous sale that inspired him with the idea of the Roxburgh club, founded in the summer of 1812, the progenitor of numerous similar societies, and the standing toast of which was—"The cause of bibliomania all over the world." Lord Spencer was its first president, and Dibdin its first vice-president. His commune with the treasures of Lord Spencer's library, if it probably interrupted and delayed the publication of his edition of Ames, was not otherwise unfruitful to bibliography. In 1814 appeared his "Bibliotheca Spenceriana," a description of the book rarities in Lord Spencer's collection, and of which his "Ædes Althorpianæ," published in 1822, may be considered a continuation. In 1817 