he affectionate injunction, 'God bless
you, dear boy; let us never see your face again!' and the political
parties which go in and out of office 'like buckets in a well' (to use
the author's own expression), are, or have been, common features of
every colony. Like several of her heroines, Mrs. Praed alternated life
in the country with the gaieties of the capital.

The position of her father, the Hon. T. L. Murray-Prior, as a member of
the Legislative Council, brought her into contact with those political
and vice-regal circles of which she has given entertaining and
occasionally derisive accounts in _Policy and Passion_, _Miss Jacobsen's
Chance_, and elsewhere. Her description in the former story of the
wealthy landowners, who adopt a passive and somewhat disdainful attitude
towards party strife, applies to a class already large in the colonies.
Whether such an attitude is consistent with 'the truest conservatism to
be found in Australia,' which they are said to represent, may be
questioned. It seems rather to indicate selfishness, petulance, and lack
of patriotism.

It is not, however, upon the business of politics or the humours and
makeshifts of colonial life that Mrs. Praed has expended her best
efforts as a writer. Some study of the human emotions is the primary
interest in all her novels. There is nearly always love of the
passionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse,
ignorance or glamour, and on the other by passing fancy or
self-interest: the love of an innocent, unsophisticated woman for a man
experienced in the pleasures and some of the darker vices of life; and,
in contrast, the blunt respect and devotion of the typical Australian
man for the same woman, and her light estimate of his worth. The
tragedies of marriage--the union of the refined and imaginative with the
coarse and commonplace, the high-souled with the worldly and cynical,
the pure with the impure--are correlative themes of some of the
strongest of the novels. In these, pathos is the prevailing tone. We
have the spectacle of the woman's blind, illogical trust abused, her
helplessness in self-inflicted misery, or the tenacity with which, in
temptation, she clings to the safeguards of conventional morality. In
most cases this tenacity, which the author accounts an instinct rather
than a virtue, is either allowed to triumph, or is placed by death
beyond the possibility of a supreme test. In the loves of Hester
Murgatroyd and Du