as a liberal-unionist. In 1885 he bought the estate of Seafield, at Ayr, built a house there, took pleasure in gardens, and collected pictures. He died there 20 February 1913.
Arrol was married three times: first, in 1864 to Elizabeth Pattison (died 1904); secondly, in 1905 to Miss Hodgart (died 1910), of Lockerbank, Ayr; thirdly, in 1910 to Elsie, daughter of James Robertson, of London. He had no children.
[Philip Phillips, The Forth Bridge, 1889; Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, February, 1913; Transactions of the Institution of Engineers and Ship-builders in Scotland, vol. lvi, 472, 1912–1913; Engineering, 21 February 1913.]
ASHBOURNE, first Baron (1837–1913), lord chancellor of Ireland. [See Gibson, Edward.]
AUSTIN, ALFRED (1835–1913), poet laureate, the second son of Joseph Austin, wool-stapler, of Leeds, by his wife, Mary, sister of Joseph Locke, M.P. [q. v.], was born at Headingley, Leeds, 30 May 1835. Of a Roman Catholic family, he was educated at Stonyhurst College (1849–1852) and then at Oscott College, whence in 1853 he graduated B.A. of London University. Called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1857, he joined the Northern circuit; but in 1858, having already published a verse-tale and a novel, he abandoned law for literature. The meagre notice given in the Athenæum to his satire, The Season (1861), drew from him a sequel abusing that journal and its editor, William Hepworth Dixon. Austin's faith in his poetic genius wavered somewhat in 1862, when a narrative poem entitled The Human Tragedy, which he gave out as the first draft of a magnum opus, was coldly received. He published no more verse till 1871, but turned again to novel-writing, though with little success. After his marriage in 1865 to Hester, daughter of Thomas Homan-Mulock, of Bellair, King's county, he sought an opening in political journalism. He contested Taunton unsuccessfully in 1865 and Dewsbury in 1880, standing in the conservative interest. From 1866 to 1896 he was leader-writer to the Standard, and occasionally acted as its special correspondent abroad, for example at the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, with the Prussian army in 1870, and at the Congress of Berlin in 1884. His chief concern was with foreign affairs. An early enthusiast for Polish and Italian patriots, his hatred of Russia made him a devoted follower of Disraeli. In 1870 he rejoiced when the Prussian sword, ‘the World's salvation, smote its insulter to the knee’ (Interludes), and by 1876 he thought Garibaldi an ‘unmitigated nuisance’. In 1883 he and William John Courthope [q. v.] became joint editors of the newly founded National Review, and Austin carried on the work for eight years after Courthope's resignation in 1887.
From 1863 Austin was a fairly regular contributor to the critical reviews. In this way, by 1870, he had given public expression to his view that Hugo, Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Arnold, Clough, and Swinburne were indifferent poets, because they were either ‘feminine’ or lyrical, and lyric he called ‘essentially childish’. He urged that no poem was great unless it was an epic or dramatic romance on a theme combining love, patriotism, and religion. In 1867 he had settled at Swinford Old Manor, near Ashford, Kent, in a domestic circle conscious of the privilege of cherishing a great poet. Feeling himself again ‘the adopted heir of Art and Nature’, he returned to poetry, and besides extending his Human Tragedy to the range of the ideal great poem, between 1871 and 1908 he published twenty volumes of verse. In 1894, a prose work, The Garden that I Love, achieved wide popular success; and because of this, or because of his journalistic services to Lord Salisbury's party, he was made poet laureate on 1 January 1896. Although the appointment was humorously criticized, the laureate's reverence for authority and for official ceremony gave him partial qualifications; but in commemorating certain national events he only revealed his own lack of all sense of the ludicrous. On the whole, his laureate pieces are better than most of their kind, although the first of them—an Ode in The Times (12 January 1896) hailing the news of the Jameson Raid—is as bad as the worst. To the end he believed that only the malice of critics and the odium theologicum prevented the world from taking him at his own high valuation. He never formally left the Church of Rome, but ‘vicarage gardens’ and ‘hamlets hallowed by their spires’ attached him sentimentally to the Church of England. He died without issue at Swinford Old Manor 2 June 1913.
By mingling earlier work with every new volume, Austin added to the apparent bulk of his writings. Probably he is best in his prose ‘garden-diaries’, casual but
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