Australian writers up to the present time seem to have been at their best in verse, and after that in short stories, Lawson’s collection, published under the title of “While the Billy Boils,” being hard to beat, particularly the stories of “The Bush Undertaker” and “The Drover’s Wife.” But it yet remains for a great Australian book to be written, and for the undoubted latent talent that certainly exists to establish itself by some more solid effort. Perhaps one of the most vivid works that has ever appeared, regarded as a true product of this country, was “My Brilliant Career,” by Myles Franklin, which, in spite of its crudities and egotism, gave rise to a hope of great things from the same pen, particularly as it was written when the authoress was only seventeen years of age; but nothing more of any note has appeared, and one fears that it was only a case of another meteoric flare. Among other more or less well-known writers Marcus Clarke was English; Mrs. Humphrey Ward left Australia when she was a small child; Mrs. Campbell Praed, Mary Gaunt, Guy Boothby, were all born in Australia; but it is for the most part in England and of England that they write. Of course, there have been, and are now, many lesser lights in addition to those of whom I have written. Among them Roderic Quinn, Brunton Stevens, and Rolf Boldrewood, who has in his own particular, obvious fashion—or, at least, in his one famous book—reached as high a level as any. Yet it is in the future that we must still seek for a sustained work of fiction, worthy both of the people and the country, a book at once as true and simple as “Marie Claire,” or Yoshio Markino’s “A Japanese Artist in London,” of which every line of writing tells as delicately and yet vividly as does each touch of his magic brush. America seems to have taken to fashioning her literature with a crimping-iron and “sheer-lawn,” while Australia hacks hers out with a billyhook from back-block and Bush. Still, there is something between the two, as perhaps Mrs. Æneas Gunn, among all the writers in this new world, has been the only one as yet to discover.