class of people who have a better capacity for enjoying the
material comforts of life than the country gentlemen of Australia. Major
Buckley is just the sort of person one might have expected to hold
decided views on the subject of dining as an art. To dine in the middle
of the day was, in his opinion, a gross abuse of the gifts of
Providence. 'I eat my dinner not so much for the sake of the dinner
itself as for the after-dinnerish feeling which follows--a feeling that
you have nothing to do, and that, if you had, you'd be shot if you'd do
it.'

On another occasion the author himself preaches a similarly agreeable
doctrine, concluding with the advice: 'My brother, let us breakfast in
Scotland, lunch in Australia, and dine in France, till our lives end.'

Nor is the kindred subject of lounging in midsummer forgotten. Anyone in
an armchair under a broad Australian verandah, who fetched anything for
himself, would, in the author's opinion, 'show himself a man of weak
mind.' Niggers were all that a Southern gentleman wanted to complete his
comfort when the sun was at baking-point. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings
undergo a playful deprecation. Did she know the exertion required for
cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind; or the amount of
perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of
Bass in January; or the physical prostration caused by breaking two
lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? The
Southern gentleman undertakes to affirm that she didn't.

In the conversation of Kingsley's colonists, the business of the
squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of
hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a
cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve
thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual
life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together
with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin
in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry
are prominently reproduced in the characters of _Ravenshoe_ and _Silcote
of Silcotes_. But in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ these qualities are perhaps more
noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later
novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially
competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is 'excessively attached
to mathematics, and