s which failed to
make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he
subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became
vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to
take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always
looked back upon it as something of a joke.

And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and
uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued
him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be
sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of
Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty--starving in his
own proud way--after failing in a small business which he had
undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession
of the barony of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of
about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found
that his title to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail
under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his
ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to
unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended
his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing
the impressions of Gordon's disposition given by his friends, it is
curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an
absence of surprise at his suicide.

It would not be difficult to imagine a more representative poet in the
provincial sense than Gordon. His description of the colonies as

'Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds,'

would be strangely misleading were it not contradicted by other lines
from the same hand, showing a delicate appreciation of the rugged
features of Australian scenery. But he sees them only in passing, or as
a symbol of something he is pondering, or as a contrast to what he has
left behind 'on far English ground.' No sight or sound of Australian
Nature is a sole subject of any of his poems. His 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs' does not express the voices of the forest, but the echoes
of a sad youth, the yearnings of an exile; his 'Song of Autumn' is not a
song of autumn, but a forecast of his own death--a forecast that was
fulfilled. If he ever felt any enthusiasm for the future nationhood of
Australia, he did not express it. And such few native l