is detail is as true to life as the example of
the sympathy and assistance accorded the bushrangers by settlers in the
neighbourhood of their mountain retreat.

It was sympathy of this kind, combined with bribery, which so protected
the Kelly gang as to involve the Government of Victoria in an outlay of
about one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds before their destruction
could be accomplished. Effective literary use will be made at some time
in the future of the exploits of this last and most daring of all the
bushranging gangs, but many years must elapse before the sordid aspects
of their career shall have been forgotten, and only its romance be left.
And nothing short of genius will be required to refine the rude
proportions of Ned Kelly into something like the gentlemanly exterior of
the dashing captain, the smooth gallant, the humorist, philosopher, and
quick-change artist of _Robbery under Arms_.

In _The Miner's Right_, which ranks second in popularity among
Boldrewood's novels, the personal narrative style is again adopted, but
with little effect of the kind produced by Dick Marston's vivid
directness in the earlier novel. Hereward Pole, the hero, is a cultured
Englishman, sensitive and sentimental, who keeps an eye upon humanity at
large, as well as upon the business of making a fortune which has
brought him to the colonies. Half of his record, though a striking
picture of the gold-fields, is not an inherent part of the story of his
own career. Confined to their strictly just limits, the events which
combine to prolong his separation from the sweetheart whom he has left
in England could have been told in fifty pages. But this would not have
been all the author wished. He was satisfied with a slender plot and a
_denouement_ which can be guessed almost from the outset as soon as he
saw that they would carry the glowing scenes and episodes of diggings
life with which his memory was so richly stocked. One cannot believe but
that, in this case, his slender attention to the long-drawn thread of
the story was the outcome of choice. Else where was the need for
elaborateness in such details as the dispute over the Liberator claim
at Yatala, the trial of Pole and the inquest on Challerson, with their
rendering of witnesses' depositions in the manner of a newspaper report,
the riot at Green Valley and Oxley, and the scene at the funeral of the
agitator Radetsky? Yet, though these episodes are given at great length,
and