ing with life in the colonies, was
published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under
her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the same
character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form
by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a
library circulation.

When the author again came before the English public, it was with a
novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated
to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character. _A
Marked Man_ is the story of a younger son of an old English county
family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his
ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious
cant, and, after making a final assertion of independence by marrying a
farmer's daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and
fortune on his own account.

The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in
the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels
at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the
village life they have left behind in the mother country--the
patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned, rather pompous house, over a
people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal
lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the
relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest
kind.

Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self,
whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his
early _mesalliance_, live in a world so much and so necessarily their
own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the
bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with
general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since
then the author has yearly increased her reputation.

Three out of five of the later novels are, like _A Marked Man_, made
comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which
we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is
not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an
essentially local first cause for any of the principal incidents of
_Not All in Vain_ and _A Marriage Ceremony_. The passionate half-brute,
Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the
world, and