Nothing struck me more, in a long and varied residence in Australia, than the keenness of the popular instinct not only in things social or political but (shall I be believed?) in things literary.

I refer exclusively to the Australian manifestations of these; for I need scarcely say that, beyond the exceedingly limited sphere of his personal experience, the average Australian is just as profoundly ignorant as the average Englishman, and perhaps he is even more so.

Few are less aware of this critical gift of his than the Anglo-Australian.

No reproach is more frequently in the mouth of the writers who supply the meagre literary comment of the local magazines and weekly newspapers than that of Australia's neglect of her “men of letters,” and especially of her poets.

Mr. Christie Murray, who has recently been speaking with candour and intelligence of what he saw and of what he thought he saw in his travels there, has accepted from them this judgment without question.

He tells us that the average Australian cares nothing for, and indeed knows nothing of, Kendall and Harpur and Stephens (Mr. Murray, by the by, is mistaken in his manner of spelling the name of this gentleman).

True, that a little later he ingenuously confutes himself by expatiating on the familiarity of even the roughest livers with the poetry of Adam Lindsey Gordon; but to the Englishman, to whom these are most probably all nomina et prœterea nihil, the case for the hopeless illiterateness of the average Australian seems made out.