Among the many interesting figures on the stage of the New Zealand of the first generation three seem to me to rise head and shoulders above the crowd--Gibbon Wakefield, Grey, and Selwyn, the founder, the ruler, the pastor. Nor must it be supposed, because these towered above their fellow-actors, that the latter were puny men. Plenty of ability found its way to the Colony, and under the stress of its early troubles wits were sharpened and faculties brightened. There is nothing like the colonial grindstone for putting an edge on good steel. Grey, Selwyn, and Wakefield, as unlike morally as they were in manner, had this in common, that they were leaders of men, and that they had men to lead. That for thirty years the representatives of the English Government, from Busby to Browne, were, with the exception of Grey, commonplace persons or worse, must not blind us to the interest of the drama or to the capacity of many of the men whom these commonplace persons were sent to guide. Of the trio referred to, Grey is the greatest figure, and most attractive and complex study. Of such a man destiny might have made a great visionary, a capable general, an eloquent tribune, or a graceful writer. He had in him the stuff for any of these. But the south wing of the British Empire had to be built, and the gods made Grey a social architect in the guise of a pro-consul. Among the colonies of the southern hemisphere he is already a figure of history, and amongst them no man has played so many parts in so many theatres with so much success. Not merely was he the saviour and organizer of New Zealand, South Australia, and South Africa; not merely was he an explorer of the deserts of New Holland, and a successful campaigner in New Zealand bush-warfare, but he found time, by way of recreation, to be an ethnologist, a literary pioneer, and an ardent book-collector who twice was generous enough to found libraries with the books which had been the solace and happiness of his working life. A mere episode of this life was the fanning of the spark of Imperialism into flame in England thirty years ago. There are those who will think the eloquence with which he led the New Zealand democracy, the results he indirectly obtained for it, and the stand which at the extreme end of his career he made with success for a popular basis for the inevitable Australian Federation, among the least of his feats. To the writer they do not seem so. Before a life so strenuous, so dramatic, and so fruitful, criticism--at least colonial criticism--is inclined respectfully to lay down its pen. But when we come to the man himself, to the mistakes he made, and the misunderstandings he caused, and to the endeavour to give some sort of sketch of what he _was_, the task is neither easy nor always pleasant. I have known those who thought Grey a nobler Gracchus and a more practical Gordon; and I have known those who thought him a mean copy of Dryden's Achitophel. His island-retreat,