too?” had struck me much, and the lines on which it ran greatly resemble those laid down by Lord Rosebery for lessening in number and improving in character the unwieldy hereditary House of Peers; but neither that writer nor Lord Rosebery grasped the idea that I made prominent in an article I wrote for The Review, which was that the reduction of the peers to 200, or any other number ought to be made on the principle of proportional representation, because otherwise the majority of the peers, being Conservative, an election on ordinary lines would result in a selection of the most extreme Conservatives in the body.  My mother had pointed out to me that the 16 representative Scottish peers elected by those who have not a seat as British peers, for the duration of each Parliament, were the most Tory of the Tories, and that the same could be said of the 28 representative peers for Ireland elected for life.  So, though the House of Lords contains a respectable minority of Liberals, under no system of exclusively majority representation could any of them be chosen among the 200.  I had the same idea of life peers to be added from the ranks of the professions, of science, and of literature, unburdened by the weight and cost of an hereditary title, that Lord Rosebery has; and into such a body I thought that representatives of the great self-governing colonies could enter, so that information about our resources, our politics, and our sociology might be available, and might permeate the press.  But, greatly to my surprise, my article was sent back, but was afterwards accepted by Fraser’s Magazine.  This was better for me, for what would have been published for nothing in The Melbourne Review brought me 8/15/0 from a good English magazine.  I continued to write for this review, until it ceased to exist, in 1885, literary and political articles.  The former included a second one on “George Eliot’s Life and Work,” and one on “Honore de Balzac,” which many of my friends thought my best literary effort.

It was through Miss Martha Turner that I was introduced to her brother and to The Melbourne Review.  She was at that time pastor of the Unitarian Church in Melbourne.  She had during the long illness of the Rev. Mr. Higginson helped her brother with the services.  At first she wrote sermons for him to deliver, but on some occasions when he was indisposed she read her own compositions.  Fine reader as Mr. H. G. Turner is he did not come up to her, and especially he could not equal her in the presentment of her own thoughts.  The congregation on the death of Mr. Higginson asked Miss Turner to accept the pastorate.  She said she could conduct the services, but she absolutely declined to do the pastoral duties—­visiting especially.  She was licensed to conduct marriage services and baptized (or, as we call it, consecrated) children to the service of Almighty God and to the service of man.  During the absence of our pastor for a long holiday in England Mr. C. L. Whitham afterwards an education inspector,