has leisure to gratify his hobby'; Harding, 'an
Oxford man,' is 'an inveterate writer of songs,' a pastime which only
the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is
intent on the education of his son, in which he is careful to provide
for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new
country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a
naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in
short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter
aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for
generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque
surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their
tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour.
The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon.
Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of
the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in _Geoffry
Hamlyn_. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country
to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely
specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the
contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on
the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With
all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it
without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather
than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful
and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural
beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of
temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He
could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of
accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian
view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds
who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all
fours.' A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description
with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth,
twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and at the
beginning of the third volume of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_
curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery
depends upon the point of view of the observer.

Kingsley's de