rican writers have caught the ear of the European public. One of these
was Robert Pringle, a Scotchman, whose poems, written sixty or seventy
years ago, possess considerable merit, and one of which, beginning with
the line,

Afar in the desert I love to ride,

remains the most striking picture of South African nature in those early
days when the wilderness was still filled with wild creatures. Another,
Miss Olive Schreiner (now Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner), has attained
deserved fame. A third, Mr. Scully, is less known in England, but his
little volume of _Kafir Tales_ is marked by much graphic power and shows
insight into native character.

These three writers, and indeed all the writers of merit, belong to the
English or Anglified section of the population. The Dutch section is
practically disqualified by its language (which, be it remembered, is
not the language of Holland, but a debased dialect) from literary
composition, even were it otherwise disposed to authorship. Literature
will always, I think, remain English in character, bearing few or no
traces of the Dutch element in the people. But otherwise things are
likely to change in a few years. The conditions which have been
described as unfavourable to intellectual production are not necessarily
permanent, and the time will probably come when the Europeans of South
Africa will emulate their kinsfolk at home or in North America in
literary and artistic fertility. The materials for imaginative work,
whether in poetry or in prose, lie ready to their hand. The scenery
deserves some great native landscape-painter, and such a genius will, no
doubt, one day arise.

Journalism has now everywhere become, in point of quantity, the most
important part of literature. The South African newspapers impress a
visitor favourably. Several of them are written with great ability, and
they were in 1895 comparatively free from that violence of invective,
that tawdriness of rhetoric, and that proneness to fill their columns
with criminal intelligence which are apt to be charged against the press
in some other new countries. No journal seems to exert so great a
political power as is wielded by several of the Australian dailies. As
might be expected, the Press is chiefly English, that language having
sixty-one papers, against seventeen printed in Dutch and twenty-three in
both languages.

Although the dispersion of the small European population over an
exceedingly wide area makes