m in many of the shorter stories.

An interesting picture of Clarke's personality is given by a writer in
the Sydney _Bulletin_: 'His wit was keen and polished, his humour
delicate and refined, and his powers of description masterly.... His
face was a remarkable one--remarkable for its singular beauty. Like
Coleridge, the poet, he was "a noticeable man with large grey eyes," and
one had but to look into them to perceive at once the light of
genius.... He was one of the best talkers I have ever met. Like Charles
Lamb, he had a stutter which seemed to emphasise and add point to his
witticisms. As in his writings, he had the knack of saying brilliant
things, and scattering _bons mots_ with apparent ease, so that in
listening to him one felt the pleasure that is derived from such books
as Horace Walpole's correspondence and those of the French
memoir-writers.... He knew not how to care for money, yet he had none
of those vices which ordinarily reduce men of genius to destitution, and
are cloaked beneath the hackneyed phrase, "He had no enemy but
himself."'

In all his journalistic criticism, Marcus Clarke scarcely more than
pointed to the material which the life of such cities as Melbourne and
Sydney offer a novelist capable of work like that of Mr. W. D. Howells,
or the series of tales of urban society in America by Mr. Marion
Crawford. There is now an opportunity, and, one might almost say, a
need, for fiction which shall also, in effect, be salutary criticism.
The Antipodes have lately illustrated the fact that a single decade will
sometimes witness a notable change in the conditions of an entire people
in a new and rapidly-developing country.

Thus, with the struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could
not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with
Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by
the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the
legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes
which never had substantial existence; the pauperising to-day of the
paper millionaire of yesterday; the spectacle of worn, old men, after
overreaching and ruining themselves, starting pitifully the race of life
afresh, a sinister experience their sole advantage over the faltering
novice; and that other common spectacle of democratic life, the secure
and cultured rich cynically eschewing the active business of
government,--with thes