ooked the rugged dignity, the truth and virility, which are their
highest characteristics. Alluding to Ferguson as one type of his
country, she observes that, 'underlying the rough-and-ready manners and
the prosaic routine of bush-life, there is an old-world chivalry, a
reverence for women, a purity of thought, a delicacy of sentiment....
This is partly due to the breezy moral atmosphere, and partly to the
influence of books, which become living realities in the solitude and
monotony of existence among the gum-trees. The typical Australian is an
odd combination of the practical and the ideal. He is a student who
learns to read to himself a foreign language, but does not attain to its
pronunciation. He has no knowledge of the current jargon or society
slang. He has unconsciously rejected vulgarisms and shallow conceits;
but all the deeper thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to the
soul, he has made his own.'

Ferguson himself echoes the same estimate in pleading his suit with Miss
Reay. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that there's a kind of chivalry which
can be practised in the bush here better than in great cities--the
chivalry Tennyson writes about--the knighthood that isn't earned by
sauntering through life in a graceful, smiling sort of way, with your
heart in your hand, but in simplicity and faith; by love of one woman,
and reverence of all women for her sake.'

Compared with the fascinating aristocrats and adventurers, the
Australian man seems crudely provincial. Yet he is never shown in an
incorrect or merely satirical light. There are, to be sure, occasions
when he appears too tame and Dobbin-like in acceptance of his lady's
caprices; but this is partly an evidence of that mixture of stiff native
pride and independence which forbids servile appeal even to one he
loves.

The deficiency of which the reader is most often conscious in
endeavouring to make a general estimate of Mrs. Praed's work is a want
of breadth in her scope--a presentation too constant and too tense of
certain phases of the passionate life of men and women, to the
comparative exclusion of those softer and higher attributes which even
Charlotte Bronte (whose touch that of Mrs. Praed occasionally resembles)
did not neglect. In other words, we are not given enough to admire.
There are few pictures--and none that can be called memorable--of happy
married life to contrast with the vivid tragedies of mistaken unions.
An inclination towards humor