“Here’s a health to every sportsman, be he statesman or lord; If his heart be true, I care not what his pockets may afford: And may he ever pleasantly his gallant sport pursue If he takes his liquor fairly, and his fences fairly, too.” And yet a hundred copies of Gordon’s poems will be sold to every half a dozen—or less—of Henry Kendall’s. Later on, among other worthy followers of Kendall, Boake—another truly Australian poet, of whom great things might have been expected save for his early death—left at least one masterpiece in “Down where the Dead Men lie”; while Victor Daly and Harry Lawson have both done memorable work, no one having more completely got at the heart of things, at the spirit of the Bush, and the soul of the bushman—ay, and of the swaggy, too—than has the latter. Lawson is not in the least dazzled by the melodramatic aspects of the country, the beautiful wild young man type that Gordon depicts, the dark and daring braggadocio. Indeed, he speaks with the bitterest scorn of those who use their art to immortalize. “The gambling and the drink that are their country’s greatest curse.” But in the pathos and the humour of the commonplace his genius burns clear, with rare glimpses of a spiritual insight far above that gospel of mere revolt with which so many of his fellows are imbued. Another Australian favourite is A. B. Paterson, whose “Man from Snowy River” has met with such immense success—a success that is not for a moment to be wondered at, for if his poetry is not of the highest type, Paterson paints the Australian Bush with such truth and vigour and such true affection, that, to those who dwell in the cities, it is like a veritable breath of the wild open country and the wild free life. “For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know: And the Bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him; For the murmur of its breezes, and the river on its bars; And he sees the vision splendid, of the sunlit plains extended And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.”