n home he
became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set of fashionable
cynics.

In _Human Repetends_, a sketch of his published several years later,
there is a passage which substantially records his experiences at this
time: 'I was thrown, when still a boy, into the society of men thrice my
age, and was tolerated as a clever impertinent in all those wicked and
witty circles in which virtuous women are conspicuous by their
absence.... I was suffered at sixteen to ape the vices of sixty.... So
long as I was reported to be moving only in that set to which my father
chose to ally himself, he never cared to inquire how I spent the
extravagant allowance which his indifference, rather than his
generosity, permitted me to waste. You can guess the result of such a
training.'

Left alone in the world at the age of eighteen, upon the death of his
father, he emigrated to Australia. Failing to take any interest in a
bank-clerkship provided by an uncle for him at Melbourne, he was sent to
a sheep-station near Glenorchy, one hundred miles inland. Here again he
paid little attention to the occupation chosen for him. All the day and
half the night were dreamed away in literary thought. Just as he
wandered alone over fern-hill and creek-bed, plain and mountain range,
and absorbed impressions of a scenery at once repulsive and fascinating
to him, so he dipped into all kinds of literature without method or set
purpose. But he preferred fiction, and as the consignee of an endless
succession of French novels he became a marked man in the eyes of the
village postmaster.

Two years had thus been spent, when a Dr. Lewins, who was known as a
'materialistic philosopher,' visited the station and made the young
Englishman's acquaintance. A warm mutual regard resulted, and soon
Lewins succeeded in obtaining a small post for Clarke on the Melbourne
_Argus_. This was the beginning of the most brilliant journalistic
career established on the Australian press.

A less happy result of the same friendship was Clarke's conversion to
the arid and uninspiring doctrines of materialism, though perhaps it
could hardly be called a conversion in the case of one upon whom the
deeper principles of Christian faith had never obtained any real hold.

Colonial democracy seems to have been to Clarke at once a source of
inspiration and of scorn. Coming from among the English upper classes,
with the education and temperament of an aristocrat, he was yet readi