e lack of interest on the part of the novelists in the cities is the
more noticeable because they contain one-third of the whole population
of the country, a proportion said not to have a parallel in any other
part of the world. This neglect is surely a mistake, founded on an
erroneous conception of the tastes of the English public, and resulting
partly from the absence of anything like a local literary influence upon
the writers. 'Have the stress and turmoil of a political career no
charm?' asks Mr. Edmund Gosse, in referring to the restricted scope of
the English novel, and in making a plea for 'a larger study of life.'

The same question might with very good reason be raised concerning the
political life of Australia, which has been almost entirely neglected
since Mrs. Campbell Praed used up the best of her early impressions and
settled in England. The majority of the writers of fiction who continue
to live in the country are women, and possibly not interested in
politics; but the chief reason why the romance is seldom written of the
Cabinet Minister who started life as a gold-digger or draper's
assistant, or of the democratic legislator whose first election was
announced to him through a hole in a steam-boiler that he was riveting,
is to be found in a belief that it would not be appreciated in the
far-off land whither all Australian books must go for the sanction of
their existence. Here again the British reader appears to be misjudged,
for has he not accepted from another direction, and enjoyed, _Democracy_
and _Through One Administration_? Mrs. Praed, lightly skimming the
surface of Antipodean political life in two of her stories, has shown it
to be not without humour, nor lacking in the elements of more serious
interest. But she cannot be said to have exhibited any particular belief
in the political novel, and none of the more practised among her
colonial contemporaries has ever given it a trial.

On the main question of a national literature it will perhaps be
concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that
not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been
rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of
wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth
affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in
an old one. The whole matter no doubt is somewhat difficult of decision.
It has been none the less useful