ly
able to sympathise with the higher principles of the new society. Its
intelligence, virility and free intercourse broadened and interested
him, as it does most young Englishmen. But for that common product of
a new country, the pretentious plutocrat, he had only contempt.

It is the bitterness with which this feeling is expressed in his
journalistic writings that helps to raise a doubt as to his capacity for
work of the best class in fiction. Still, if it be true, as some of
those who were his friends say, that this occasional work was seldom
much studied, it becomes unreliable as an indicator of the writer's
character. The same hand that in the famous _Snob Papers_ so savagely,
and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English
society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential
facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have
been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly
criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been
judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these
articles, remarkable as the work of one who was only in his
twenty-second year, there is a closeness of observation and incisiveness
of style which promised much more for their author than the
circumstances of his life afterwards permitted him to realise.

The usual effects of an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood
explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the
service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he
seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting
the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence
to a degree that left little energy for ambitious work.

His was not an idle nature by any means: it was only erratic, fond of
variety, impatient of drudgery. Thus, in the course of fourteen years'
literary work, his thoughts make excursions from town-life to
country-life, from social satire to story-telling, from art to
ethnology, from theology to opera-bouffe! Here are the titles of a few
of his compositions: _Lower Bohemia in Melbourne_ (a sketch), _Plot_ (a
sensational drama), _Review of Comte and Positive Philosophy_ (magazine
article), _The Humbug Papers_ (humorous and satirical), _The Future
Australian Race_ (an ethnological study), _Goody Two Shoes_ (a
pantomime), _Civilization without Delusion_ (a theological discussion
with the