DIBDIN, Thomas (1771-1841), English dramatist and song writer, was one of the sons of the subject of last notice, and was born on the 21st of March 1771. He was apprenticed to a London upholsterer, but after four years’ service he broke his engagement and joined a company of country players. From 1789 to 1795 he performed in every department of the drama, composing daring the same period more than 1000 songs, and making his first attempt as a dramatic writer. He returned to London in 1795, having married two years before; and in the winter of 1798-1799 his Jew and the Doctor was produced at Covent Garden. From this time he contributed a very large number of comedies, operas, farces, &c., to the public entertainment. Some of these brought immense popularity to the writer and immense profits to the theatres. It is stated that the pantomime of Mother Goose produced more than £20,000 at Covent Garden Theatre, and the High-mettled Racer £18,000 at Astley’s. Notwithstanding this run of popularity, aud the author’s connection with theatrical notabilities, his last years were passed in comparative indigence. In 1827 he published two volumes of Reminiscences; and at the time of his death he was preparing an edition of his father’s sea songs, for which a small sum was allowed him weekly by the lords of the Admiralty. He died in London, September 16, 1841.

DIBDIN, Rev. Thomas Frognall (1776-1847), an enthusiastic bibliographer, born at Calcutta in 1776, was the son of Thomas Dibdin, the sailor brother of Charles Dibdin, whom the latter has immortalized in his song “Poor Tom Bowling.” His father and mother both died on the voyage home to England in 1780, and he was brought up by a maternal uncle. He was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, but left the university without taking his degree. Intended for the bar, he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, and studied for a time in the chambers of Basil Montague. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain practice as a provincial counsel at Worcester, he resolved to abandon law for the church, and he was ordained a clergyman at the close of 1804. His ecclesiastical preferment was slow. For a number of years he had to content himself with the appointment of preacher at various chapels in the West End of London, and it was not until 1823 that he received the living of Exning in Sussex. Soon afterwards he was appointed by Lord Liverpool to the rectory of St Mary’s, Bryanstone Square, which he held until his death on the 18th November 1847. The first of the numerous bibliographical works on which Dibdin’s fame entirely rests was his Introduction to the Knowledge of the Rare and Valuable Editions of the Latin and Greek Classics (1803), which, though superficial, incomplete, and untrustworthy in many of its details, supplied a blank in English literature. A fourth and greatly enlarged edition appeared in 1827. The first edition rendered a valuable service to its author in bringing him under the notice of Earl Spencer, to whom he owed not only his first living but much important aid in his bibliographical pursuits. The rich library at Althorp was thrown open to him; he spent much of his time in it, aud in 1814 published his Bibliotheca Spenceriana, giving an account of the many rare works it contained. As the library was not open to the general public, the information given in the Bibliotheca was found very useful, but the work was marred by the inaccuracy in matters of detail which more or less characterized all its author’s productions. This fault was naturally least obtrusive in a series of playful, discursive works in the form of dialogues on his favourite subject, in which great exactness was not necessary. The first of these, Bibliomania (1809), was republished with large additions in 1811, and was very popular, passing through numerous editions. To the same class belonged the Bibliographical Decameron, a larger work, which appeared in 1817, and has a higher value than its predecessor, though it did not attain the same circulation. In 1810 he commenced the publication of a new and much extended edition of Ames’s Typographical Antiquities. The first volume was so great a success that Dibdin realized £600 by it. This, however, was not maintained, and the fourth volume, which did not appear until 1819, fell almost stillborn from the press. The work was scarcely half-finished when its publication was thus checked. The chief cause of its failure was that Dibdin had not critical sagacity enough to make a thorough change in the arrangement his predecessor had followed, and to enable him to distinguish what was valuable from what was worthless in the vast stores of information he had himself collected. In 1818 Dibdin was commissioned by his patron, Earl Spencer, to purchase books for him on the Continent, and he afterwards published an account of his journey in his Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (3 vols. 1821), which was got up in a most sumptuous style, the engravings alone, it is said, costing £5000. In 1824 he published an ambitious venture in his Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and Old Man's Comfort in the Choice of a Library, which was intended to point out the best works in all departments of literature. His culture was not broad enough to render him competent for the task, and the Library Companion, being severely criticized in the Quarterly and Westminster Reviews, seriously injured his reputation. He had been for some time involved in pecuniary difficulties, from which he tried to free himself with only partial success by extending the range of his literary activity. He wrote for periodicals, published many of his sermons, and for some years gave himself chiefly to religious literature. He returned to bibliography in his Bibliophobia, or Remarks on the Present Depression in the State of Literature and the Book Trade (1831), and the same subject furnishes the main interest of his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836), and his Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and Scotland (1838). Didbin was the originator and vice-president, Lord Spencer being the president, of the Roκburghe Club, founded in 1812,—the first of the numerous book clubs which have done such service to literature in the present century.