Gold districts are so extensive and productive that a great part of the population is engaged in them. Then add that silver, mercury, copper, lead, manganese, antimony, and iron exist in abundance. They are as reserves of public fortune to the colony. This country has had the rare good fortune of having already among its inhabitants distinguished scientific men who have explored the region for the greater profit of the new society, and for the interests of those who are occupied with the general knowledge of the globe. The Institute of New Zealand was founded at Auckland in 1868. Its members proposed to have for their use museums and public libraries, and to disseminate by all means possible, instruction relative to questions of art, of science, and of literature. When the capital was moved to Wellington the Institute was also transferred. Since its opening it has published every year a great volume filled with reports and communications of deep interest in regard to the ancient inhabitants of the country, the fauna and the flora, the geology and mineralogy and economy. It is a valuable work on the natural history of this region of the world. The decline, the oppression, almost the annihilation of one race of mankind has been seen here. We may see now upon the same soil, rising to prominence, men of another race who talk of liberty for themselves, and are preparing for a long and glorious future for their descendants. THE LAUREATE POETS. BY THE REVEREND A. E. WINSHIP. CHAPTER III. Royal favors skip from small to great and back again by no law of ethics or æsthetics, and if we flatter ourselves that we can account for the choice of some candidates for the poet’s pension we shall certainly find our wits tested in search of a philosophy to apply to Charles II., who, with equal felicity, placed the crown on the geniusless Davenant and the immortal Dryden. John Dryden, with all his faults of verse and purpose, was the genius of his age, and remains one of the five names that star the diadem of English song. In circumstances that tended to enervate rhyme, at a time when the rebound from Puritanism paid a premium on license and licentiousness, when no element in national life had the electrical currents to stimulate literary, least of all poetic genius, John Dryden had the skill to attune the age in which he lived to a melodious key that harmonizes with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere and Milton. In character and record he is inexplicable. Born in the erratic days of Cromwell he is the most heartily English of all her “men of letters;” of strictest Puritan training, he died a devout Romanist; of cleanly life and chaste conversation, his verses are morally reckless; educated at Cambridge, where he remained for a seven years’ post-graduate course, he was noted for disloyalty to his _Alma Mater_; never wrote a line in praise of it, but went out of his way to endorse its rival—Oxford—to whom he owed nothing.