, the prig with a mission to set the
world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a
sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the
spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.'

His friend, Major Duff-Scott, 'an ex-officer of dragoons, and a late
prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his
social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and
well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous
crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with
great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.'

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.

The strongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon's poetry is a personal one.
When he represents Australia best, he best represents his own striking
character. Yet that character had clearly shown itself, as had also his
lyric gift, before he saw Australia. He is the favourite poet of the
country by a happy fortuity rather than by the merit of special native
inspiration. Those tastes of the people which he has expressed in manner
and degree so rare as to make a parallel difficult of conception were
also his own dominant tastes. From early boyhood they had controlled his
life, and in the end they wrecked it.

That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude
associations and without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual
society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And
when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare
vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of
their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the
author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that
Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern
Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for
manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country
gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still
have had 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' 'The Romance of Britomarte,' 'By
Flood and Field,' and 'How we beat the Favourite.' And do these not form
the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the
chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words,
with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found
time to celebrate the things which hi