eir sloping shores,
sleeping upon the silver tide--pretty white cottages and many
English-looking villas peeping out here and there from their surrounding
shrubberies, and the whole canopied by a sky of ethereal blue, present a
picture which must at once enchant the most fastidious observer.

We found lying in the famous cove of Sydney, H.M.S. Alligator and
Britomart, commanded by Captain Sir Gordon Bremer, and Lieutenant (now
Captain) Owen Stanley, going to form a settlement at Port Essington on
the North coast; an expedition of much interest, particularly to us, from
having some old shipmates engaged in it.

CONTRAST WITH SOUTH AMERICA.

On first arriving at Sydney from South America, I was much struck with
the strange contrast its extensive and at the same time youthful
appearance presented to the decrepit and decaying aspect of the cities on
that continent. We had then been visiting colonies and settlements
founded centuries ago, by a nation at that time almost supreme in
European influence, and planted with every circumstance of apparent
advantage upon the shores of a fertile and luxurious continent given by
the immortal Genoese to the crown of Spain. We had found them distracted
by internal commotions, disgraced by ignorance, debased by superstition,
and defiled by slavery.

COLONISATION.

In Sydney we beheld with wonder what scarce half a century had sufficed
to effect; for where almost within the memory of man the savage ranged
the desert wastes and trackless forests, a noble city has sprung as
though by magic from the ground, which will ever serve both as a monument
of English enterprise, and as a beacon from whence the light of Christian
civilisation shall spread through the dark and gloomy recesses of
ignorance and guilt. The true history of our Australian possessions; the
causes which have led to their settlement; the means by which they have
been established; the circumstances by which they have been influenced;
and the rapid, nay, unexampled prosperity to which they have attained;
present some of the most curious and most important laws of colonisation
to our notice. Without attempting so far to deviate from my present
purpose as to enter here on a deduction from the data to which I have
alluded, it cannot be denied that, in the words of an eloquent writer in
Blackwood, "a great experiment in the faculty of renovation in the human
character, has found its field in the solitudes of this vast continent: