ld be fuller and
clearer, and, minor details apart, more reliable than could be gathered
from any other source.

Where is there in the elaborate histories of Rusden, Lang, Blair, and
Flanagan, or in any of the numerous books of sketches and reminiscences
written by persons who have visited or temporarily resided in Australia,
a view of the picturesque variety, colour, and splendid energy of the
great first race for gold to compare with that given in the second
volume of _The Miner's Right_, or with the memorable account of what
Starlight and the Marstons saw at Turon during their temporary
retirement from the highway?

Boldrewood, in these descriptions, has done what Henry Kingsley, with
his more eloquent pen, if slighter personal experience, unaccountably
neglected, and what Charles Reade, though he never saw Australia,
vividly imagined, and regretted his inability to fully employ. Reade saw
a theme for a great epic 'in the sudden return of a society far more
complex, artificial, and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to
elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its
novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and
native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the
gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in
a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge
army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's
constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own
heart; in the "siege of gold" defended stoutly by rock and disease; in
the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at
last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design.'

If Boldrewood had not himself realized the literary value of the
stirring scenes in which his youth was passed, this summary of the
English novelist, published in 1856, might well have suggested it to
him. How far has he succeeded in commemorating those scenes, and in what
directions chiefly?

In the first place, it is the pictorial, the literal, not the
philosophical, aspect of the subject which has most attracted him. There
is a personal zest in his remembrance of the general animation of the
scene, a keen sense of the pleasurable excitement, freedom and
good-fellowship of the life. His books are essentially men's books. This
is the universal report of the English libraries. Analytical subtleties