at the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in
their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is
usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an
excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one
'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences
and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working
classes, so far as it can be ascertained from the records of the
principal free libraries, is, curious as it may seem, decidedly sounder
than that attributed to the customers of the subscription libraries. It
must be remembered, however, that the former are seldom tempted with new
fiction, and never with fiction of the spicy or questionable kind. Some
of the larger institutions are rigidly exclusive in regard to the light
kinds of literature.

Authorship in Australia loses an important incentive in the absence of
local magazines. All of the better kind have lacked sufficient public
support. Several of them, including the _Colonial Monthly_ (established
by Marcus Clarke), the _Melbourne Review_, the _Centennial Magazine_,
and the _Australasian Critic_ (the latter conducted by the professors of
the Melbourne University) promised so well that their want of support is
not easily explainable. It has been attributed to an unreasoning
prejudice, an assumption that being locally produced they must
necessarily be inferior; but this probably does the reading public less
than justice. Apparently from their contents, most of the magazines
failed because they were made too Australian in character, too unlike
the English periodicals to which readers had been so long accustomed.
There are many fine magazines in the United States, but their conductors
do not make the mistake of trying to do without British and European
contributions. They know the value of names as well as of matter.
Foreign writers supply about one-third of the contents of the monthlies.
When great interest suddenly attaches to some national question, their
enterprise, like that of the newspapers of the country, sometimes takes
the special form of securing cabled summaries of the opinions of
influential politicians in Great Britain and elsewhere for immediate
publication.

A contributory cause of the failure of Australian magazines is the fact
that the cost of their mechanical production has always been higher
than that of any of their imported competit