ded with singular completeness.

Save the technical knowledge of geology shown by Trevittick in _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_, and by the encyclopaedic Dr. Mulhaus in his
lecture at the picnic in the grass-covered crater of Mirngish, there is
nothing to suggest that the author had any personal acquaintance with
mining in the colonies. The experience that was so fresh and abundant in
his mind is put aside in favour of a set of facts and pictures not even
incidentally connected with life on the gold-fields.

As if to emphasise the motive of his choice, if motive there was, he
selected the pre-auriferous period for the Australian parts of his
stories. His squatters become wealthy by a comparatively slow process,
extending over some sixteen years. The squatters of the gold period
would certainly seem better adapted to the purposes of fiction. There
is, indeed, more than a suggestion of romance in the sudden burst of
fortune which within the first few years after 1851 raised so many of
them from positions of struggling uncertainty to affluence, with incomes
varying from ten to twenty thousand pounds, and in some few cases as
high as thirty thousand pounds, a year.

The first and last use Kingsley made of his gold-fields experience is
seen in the sketch of mining of the successful sort in the third volume
of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but this is so slight that it might
have been imagined by a writer who had never handled a shovel or a
washing-cradle in his life.

The Australian people have so often been the subject of flippant and
ill-natured criticisms, that they can readily appreciate any liberal
estimate of themselves in whatever form it may be placed before their
kindred in Great Britain. It is a fact, as natural as it is undeniable,
that they are very sensitive to praise or blame. What wounds them more
than adverse comment itself, is the circumstance of its often proceeding
from persons who have accepted without warning their too prompt and
trustful hospitality.

To anyone but the incorrigibly confident and good-natured Antipodean,
the lesson would be obvious, namely, that the distinguished visitor
should be petted less, and left more dependent upon his own devices in
the collection of materials for the inevitable book or magazine article.
Though the result might be the same, there would be no ingratitude, and
the critic would be less able to pose as an impartial inside observer of
Australian society.

Perh