If circumstances won't make a poet, as genius contemptuously asserts, nor make up for blood in a horse, as even the stable boy swears to, they are at times marvellously effective in making, and, for the matter of that, also in unmaking men. So might we say with regard to the well-known subject of this sketch, who, arriving amongst us with the earliest, and within the repellent surrounding of an evil repute, yet under different surroundings and favouring circumstances outlived all traducements, whether true or otherwise, and after a long, practical, and singularly useful career, died in the full regard of his adopted country. The unanimity of dislike and moral depreciation with which he was regarded by his Tasmanian fellows was not indeed without a certain share of reason or excuse. That he was the son of a convict ought not, of course, to prejudice him in these Christian days, when the sins of the fathers are not to be visited upon the sons even to the first generation. His father arrived with Collins's prisoner party, and the boy, John Pascoe, then eleven years old, was sent with his parent--for not seldom were wives or children thus sent with the convicts, to ameliorate by such a touch of nature the hard features of a society of adult vice, much as Hogarth, in some of his masterpieces of the human woes or vices of his time, gives, in striking contrast, a foreground of maternal affection, or of children at play in the artless innocence of their looks and ways. But he was probably neither a pretty nor an interesting boy; for as a man he was of the very plainest, with a short figure, always negligently "put on," a rough, mannerless way, and a voice husky and hoarse, although redeemed at times into an approach to commanding an audience, when he was strongly stirred in some exciting cause. Some people have no patience to subdue natural antipathies in such cases, and these people would, as well-known scripture (with some transposition of the idea) tells us, be apt to be most plentiful "in his own country." But, again, Fawkner was himself a convict. Yes, but for what? Certainly if a man so notorious in after life had committed any very disparaging crime it must have been as notorious as his name. But I never heard anything distinctive beyond that he had, for something or other, passed under the Caudine Forks of the Van Diemen's Land Criminal Courts. Inevitably his early upbringing was in low associations, where, probably, ties of friendly feeling survived, as to which he might have said with the bard of Avon--"I am not of that feather to shake off my friend when he must need me" (Timon of Athens). My impression was that he had been convicted of harbouring, or aiding to escape, some who had broken the law, whatever more that may have meant, for, with his pluck, he was probably little troubled about niceties of fine feeling, and, thus accoutred, Providence dropped the man amongst altogether different circumstances