But the Australian poets have their _forte_. In realistic pictures of rough or pioneer social life, they surpass the Canadian poets. The Canadian poet Drummond, of course, stands in a class by himself, inasmuch as his poetry of the _habitant_ and _voyageur_ was a field pre-empted by him and inasmuch as his poetry in this field is devoted to picturesque revealment of the _humanity_—the pathos and humor—of the thought, speech and simple life—of a peculiar but morally worthy people. There is nothing melodramatic in Drummond’s poetry. It is genuinely humanized verse about a genuinely human people. Service’s Western and Northern Canadian verse, on the contrary, is the poetry of picaresque melodrama. The best ballads of the Australian poets of rough or pioneer life, A. L. Gordon, A. B. Patterson, Henry Lawson, C. J. Dennis, are authentic poetry. In remarking the distinction between the Australian and the Canadian poets of rude or picaresque life, Mr. E. B. Osborn truthfully says: ‘Some of the poems in his [Service’s] last volume are a _near approach_ to the Australian realism, which avoids the melodramatic and the splashing of anapests as far as possible and makes use of the quiet-curtain. So far the manly adventurous poets of Canada [Service, Stead, McInnes, Fraser, _et al._] have not progressed far beyond the Adam Lindsay Gordon convention. As yet none of the Western Canadian poets see that _style_ is the only antiseptic and, as artists, they are far behind the Australians and compare unfavorably with the minor masters of Quebec.’ What has been said regarding the technical finish of Australian verse applies also to the verse of New Zealand and of South Africa, and to the latter with even more truth. For all the South African poets happened to be men and women of culture. Thomas Pringle was a man of rare and refined culture. So are Arthur Cripps, R. C. Russell, John Runcie, Mrs. Beatrice Bromley, W. C. Scully, and a score of others.