and
occasional scorn. The sketches of Mrs. Anstey Hobbs' efforts to found a
salon, the flirtations of Mrs. Lee-Travers--who 'chose her admirers to
suit her style of dress'--Laurette Tareling's solemn respect for
Government House, and the generally satirical view of the 'incessant
mimicking of other mimicries,' are no doubt justified; they are often
decidedly entertaining. But it would of course be a mistake to accept
all this as more than a partial view of Melbourne society. The book does
not pretend to deal with it in other than an incidental manner. Mrs.
Macleod's studies of character and often clever dialogue suggest that
she might profitably adapt to the presentation of Australian life the
quiet intensity of Tourgueneff, or the delicately observant style of the
American critical realists, Henry James, W. D. Howells and Richard
Harding Davis. And here one wonders whether the Australian novelists who
find so little material in Sydney and Melbourne have seen what the new
writer, Henry B. Fuller, has done with the life of modern unromantic
Chicago?

According to Mr. Howells, America, through the medium of its own
particular class of novel, 'is getting represented with unexampled
fulness.' The writers 'excel in small pieces with three or four
figures,' and are able conveniently to dispense with sensationalism--a
point not yet reached by Antipodean novelists. 'Every now and then,' he
says, referring to the extreme of this type, 'I read a book with perfect
comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would
gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody
else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or
a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster
of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole story;
"no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman
said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest
interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general
conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.' As the
Transatlantic social conditions, of which the realistic novel with only
three or four figures is understood to be the outcome, are being more or
less repeated in Australia, a similar literary medium will probably be
found best adapted to the portrayal of life there. At least it may be
claimed that there is no lack of material in the