y in the society of her elders, she early develops into a
quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a
peacock like the Reverend Meekin.

To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her
innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a
strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel
fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so
tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a
relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers,
despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely
womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places
her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.

Not the least of the elements which combine to make _His Natural Life_
one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional
skilful varying of its painful realism with a colouring of romance, as
in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when
she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement;
his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and
deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety
against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and
joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen's
Land.

What Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'the Robinson Crusoe touches' in the
story--including the experiences of the marooned party at Macquarie
Harbour, and those of Rex in his escape through the Devil's
Blowhole--also help to leave with the reader of the novel an
ineffaceable memory.

HENRY KINGSLEY.

What are the special qualities that constitute the permanent charm of
Henry Kingsley's early novels? Some English critics, judging him by
principles of literary art, have said that his best work is in many
places of slovenly construction, deficient in dramatic power, and
imitative in expression. A series of episodes, they observe, supply the
place of a plot in _The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn_; the central
motive of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ is an impossible story of a
young woman's self-sacrifice; and the Thackerayan mannerisms in
_Ravenshoe_ are an offensive blemish upon an otherwise fine novel.

As a set-off to these defects, which are of less real consequence than
may appear from their brief enumeration