shape of individual
traits which have not yet been suitably described in any form.

MARCUS CLARKE.

In the peculiarity of his fitful talents, and in the character of his
best work in fiction--a pathetically slender life's product--Marcus
Clarke is still alone in Australian literature. Others have shown the
cheerful, hopeful, romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less
honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured
some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its
scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed
only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher
qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he
might almost have done for Australian city life what Thackeray did for
the London of seventy years ago. He could, at least, have written a
novel of manners that would have credited the people of Australia with
some individuality: such a novel as would mark the effects which
comparative isolation must produce in a people who are educated and
intelligent beyond the average of the British race, intensely
self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now
native-born,--a novel that would have corrected the too languidly
accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few
weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of
Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one
branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than
the Australian swarm is like the hive it sprang from.'

A rhetorical half-truth of this kind, as applied to the entire people,
can best be answered in the manner of the modern realists. The field is
narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing
the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret
impressions of the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail;
who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a
'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who
will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce
a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As
qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage,
straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded
to a forcible and satirical style of expression.

Whether he had the tact and tempera