ed than Kingsley's had been. Above
all, his tastes, and in some degree his temperament, differed
markedly from those of his predecessor in the field. The judgment or
instinct that kept him from coming into direct competition with
Kingsley--assuming his own questionable belief that any effort of his
would have been competition--at least erred on the side of safety. That
the immediate alternative should have been an imitative example of a
hackneyed class of English novel, ineffective of purpose,
book-inspired, and tainted with the deadness of cynicism, is something
which admits of a more definite opinion.

'I have often thought,' says the writer, referring to the hero of
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ 'and I dare say other Australian readers have thought
also, How would Sam Buckley get on in England? My excuse, therefore, in
offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the
sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that
I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the
fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians
still call "Home."'

Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected
such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he
first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or
unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour
of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter,
really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of
the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything
typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of
passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator
of it.

To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, 'the sort of man that
one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name'; that although he was
shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only
when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of
music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he 'could pick you out
any bullock in a herd ... shear a hundred sheep a day ... and drive four
horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in
Australia,'--to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that
Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise
than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short d