natural and entertaining.

There is an attention to detail in his portrait which suggests that the
lineaments of the conventional society villain may have been filled in
with the help of a little personal knowledge, perhaps of some of those
morally doubtful individuals already mentioned as having been among the
acquaintances of Clarke's early youth. Dacre is the chief cynic of the
story, and to him are assigned the best of the dialogue and all of the
small stock of humour to be found in the novel. But the man who is both
his associate and enemy, Cyril Chatteris, is a common sort of dastard,
and altogether disagreeable.

The author is not entirely forgetful of the interests of his nominal
hero. If throughout three-fourths of the story Calverley is made the
plaything of circumstances that favour only rogues, he is at last
allowed a triumph in love and sport which, though unsatisfying from an
artistic point of view, is calculated to soothe a not too fastidious
taste for poetic justice.

Conscious of the conventional character of his principal theme, the
author apparently sought to improve it by deepening its intensity. The
result of this was to add more of weakness than of strength. Incidents
that might have been effectively dramatic become melodramatic; the
conceivably probable is sometimes strained into the obviously
improbable. The agreeable finish to the minor love-story of Calverley
and Miss Ffrench does not remove the general savour of sordidness which
the reader carries away from the study of so much of the bad side of
human nature.

In connection with criticism of this kind, it ought, however, to be
noted that other hands besides the author's are known to have
contributed to the novel. Shortly after it began to appear serially in
the _Colonial Monthly_, Marcus Clarke fell from a horse while hunting,
and sustained a fracture of the skull which interrupted his literary
work for many weeks. How much of the writing had previously been done
seems to be a subject of dispute. It is, however, quite clear that, in
order to preserve continuity in the publication of the parts, Clarke's
friends did write some portion of the story, but whether in accordance
with the author's _scenario_, supposing one to have existed, has not
been stated.

'Only a few of the first chapters' were the work of Clarke, says the
editor of the _Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume_, writing in 1884; but in
an article published in the _Imperial Review_