the last three years it has been languishing.  The most flourishing magazine is the Victorian Review, which is only three years old.  The contents are very variable in quality.  Occasionally there is a really first-class article, and generally there are one or two very readable.  The quality has much fallen off during the last eighteen months, but it affords a convenient outlet for the young colonists to air political and social crotchets, and to descant on philosophical theories.  Now and then the editor used to hook a big fish, such as the Duke of Manchester, Professor Amos, and Senor Castelar, who have all contributed to its columns.  The philosophical articles are naturally very feeble, but not unfrequently university professors and others among the ablest residents in Australia make the Review a vehicle for setting forth schemes and ideas, which would not find admission into the newspapers.

LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND ART.

Strictly speaking, there is not, and cannot yet be, any such thing as an Australian literature.  Such writers as live in Australia are nearly all English-born or bred, and draw their inspiration from English sources.  A new country offers few subjects for poetry and romance, and prophecy is by no means so inspiring as the relation of the great deeds of the past.  But yet there has been at least one amongst us who may claim to have had the real poetic afflatus, and whose subjects were invariably taken from the events of the life around him.  This was Thomas Gordon, the author of ‘How we Beat the Favourite,’ and several other short pieces of verse of rare merit, and redolent of the Australian air.  George Brunton Stephens is another versifier, who at times showed signs of genius; and it is not long since a Mr. Horace Kendall died, who ran off sheets of graceful verses with considerable talent and no little poetic fancy.

In philosophy, history, and science, many of the Professors at Australian Universities have written treatises worth reading; but Australia has had so little influence either upon their subjects or their mode of treating them, that their merit cannot be claimed for this country.  Perhaps the best-known writers of this class, resident in the colonies, are Professor Hearn, author of ‘The Aryan Household.’ and Mr. Charles A. Pearson, the historian of the Middle Ages.

Australia may boast of having furnished no uninteresting theme to Henry Kingsley, and several minor English novelists.  She has sent to England no less rising a light than Mr. B. L. Farjeon; but the few novels that are written and published here have never attracted notice across the ocean, and rarely even in Australia itself, if we except Mr. Marcus Clarke’s ‘His Natural Life.’  After Mr. Clarke come Mr. Garnet Walsh, Mr. Grosvenor Bunster, and one or two prophets in their own neighbourhood, pleasant writers of Christmas stories, clever dramatizers of novels and pantomime-writers, but none of them with the least claim to a wider audience.