'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible, motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he was born. 'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted both the things I had objected to.' Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger for their having been made. It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone remains to take an interest in the unhappiest period of Australian history. From its pages may be learned how long it has taken the intelligent theorist of the British Government to acquire a practical method of treating a difficult social question; how long stupidity and inhumanity may be practised with the sanction of what Major Vickers was fond of respectfully calling 'the King's regulations'; and how far English gentlemen, remote from the influence of public opinion and invested with more power than single individuals should ever possess, may become despots, and even blackguards.