Nor is the kindred subject of lounging in midsummer forgotten. Anyone in an armchair under a broad Australian verandah, who fetched anything for himself, would, in the author's opinion, 'show himself a man of weak mind.' Niggers were all that a Southern gentleman wanted to complete his comfort when the sun was at baking-point. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings undergo a playful deprecation. Did she know the exertion required for cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind; or the amount of perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of Bass in January; or the physical prostration caused by breaking two lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? The Southern gentleman undertakes to affirm that she didn't. In the conversation of Kingsley's colonists, the business of the squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry are prominently reproduced in the characters of _Ravenshoe_ and _Silcote of Silcotes_. But in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ these qualities are perhaps more noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is 'excessively attached to mathematics, and has leisure to gratify his hobby'; Harding, 'an Oxford man,' is 'an inveterate writer of songs,' a pastime which only the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is intent on the education of his son, in which he is careful to provide for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on