(taking the
order of their publication in London) to the development of even those
characters most concerned in his plots. The fault is purely one of
judgment. It is hardly possible to suppose any lack of ability in a
writer who has produced the bright and suggestive dialogue scattered
through the pages of _Robbery under Arms_ and The _Miner's Right_.
Giving rein to his passion for reminiscence and descriptive detail, he
has paid the inevitable penalty of a loss in human interest. So obvious
is this loss in the stories of pastoral life, that one is almost fain to
assume it to be the result of deliberate choice. How far the author, in
this section of his writing, has neglected the social and dramatic
possibilities of country life, can be judged by noting Mrs. Campbell
Praed's work in _The Head Station_, _Policy and Passion_, or _The
Romance of a Station_. But the best contrast to Boldrewood's style is
furnished by the author of _Geoffry Hamlyn_.

Henry Kingsley decided the movement of his characters with a loving
care. Their interests were paramount to him. They made their own story;
the story did not make them. Their author cared little for the externals
of Australian life except in so far as they helped to tell something,
especially something good, of his leading personages. His interest in
them was not semi-scientific, like that of Thackeray or Jane Austen,
Howells or Henry James, in their studies of human nature; it was that
mainly of a sympathiser and a partisan.

His frequently expressed anxiety about the impression they were making
upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real
solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his
sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor.
'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then
there is a naive enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social
deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but
it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant interest in his
characters.

Nearly everything in his descriptions of Australian squatting pursuits
is intended to have a definite and notable bearing upon them. Thus, the
view we get of the drafting-yard at Garoopna, with Sam Buckley in torn
shirt, dust-covered, and wielding a deft pole on the noses of the
terrified cattle, is not presented as a piece of station-life so much as
a picturesque means of leading Alice Brentwood