the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours.' A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth, twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and at the beginning of the third volume of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery depends upon the point of view of the observer. Kingsley's descriptions, like all else that he wrote of the country, breathe an unmistakable personal enjoyment. They are the natural expression of a happy disposition, just as is the boyish fun with which he surrounds the love-making of his characters. 'Halbert kicked Jim's shins under the table, and whispered: "You've lost your money, old fellow!"' when Sam Buckley, flushed and happy, rejoined his friends in the sitting-room at Garoopna, after proposing to Alice in the garden. Jim Brentwood had peevishly bet his friend that the lovers would go on shilly-shallying half their lives; but Halbert, with keener vision, had foreseen the very hour of their betrothal, and made a bet of five pounds on the event. More comical still is the spectacle of Hamlyn ducking under the bedclothes to escape the boot that is about to be flung at him, for laughingly discrediting the story of which his bosom-friend Stockbridge has tragically unburdened himself concerning the evaporation of his love for Mary Hawker. Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model of manliness.