tionists at home; for both are visible in Australia itself, brief as the history of federation has been. These fiscal questions are distinctly burning; and, although there is room for confidence that they will be settled eventually, there is one other question, divided into two parts, which cannot be regarded without apprehension. It is the question involved in the cry for a White Australia. Sir Donald Wallace treats this matter with a discretion, shown mainly in omissions, which is doubtless deliberate. He expresses the view, unquestionably correct, that the object of the Labour party, which is very strong, is not to develope the resources of Australia, but to keep Australia as a comfortable preserve for themselves and for their children after them. It is not exactly a noble aim, but it is an intelligible one. It accounts for a set determination to keep out cheap Chinese labour,' and Japanese labour also. This last resolve, by the way, may not be entirely convenient to an Empire which has recently contracted a solemn alliance with Japan.

But this is far, very far indeed, from being the whole question. It is outside Queensland that the cry for a White Australia has its main strength; it is inside Queensland that, if the cry is to be effectual in the end, the price must be paid. Three industries, the pastoral, the mining, and the sugar-growing, give Queensland more than eleven millions a year to expend in purchasing what it requires in foreign markets. If the Kanaka labour goes, the sugar industry, and the money invested in it, must of necessity perish also. White men simply cannot work and 'trash' the cane in tropical Queensland; and a visit to Queensland usually suffices to modify the views of the most ardent abolitionist. Such a visit is said, indeed, to have influenced the views of Mr Barton himself; and it is noteworthy that, although he brought in the Pacific Islanders' Bill, his arguments in its support dealt not so much with the merits of the measure as with the votes which had been given in its favour during the Federal elections. But we must not permit ourselves to discuss the subject; it has been introduced here simply to show how necessary it is for federationists, even in a single continent, to respect the individuality of the various units. Travel, and the knowledge accumulated by travel, are the only medicines which can enable statesmen to avoid

the dangers arising from lack of necessary knowledge. But one deduction may safely be made. If one part of Australia be as foreign as Queensland is to the rest, how much greater would be the risks and difficulties of federation upon a grander and even a world-wide scale?

'Festina lente' is the parting caution of Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace; and it is needed. The recurrence of the word 'premature' in his observations points to a vague belief that formal federation will come to pass at some future date; yet with that belief goes hand in hand a prudent apprehension of the dangers of every definite scheme which has, so far, been devised by the ingenuity of man. It was said by one of old time, 'There can be no truth without definition'; but he was a theologian, and there are differences of opinion about even this dogma. On the other hand, the manner in which the Colonies rallied to the aid of the mother-country in her need, even in the face of crass discouragement, proves that there can be true sentiment, real loyalty, and heartfelt affection, without any definition whatever. Surely the lesson to be learned is that, to use the words of a South Australian to Sir Donald Wallace (p. 463),

'the evolution of the Empire may safely be left to time and the developing genius of the British race.'

The South Australian, be it observed, did not say the evolution of federation,' but the evolution of the Empire'; and he was wise. In a word, conferences for the exchango of opinions upon commercial or other points may do a world of good, but there is little reason for believing that a Federal Council in the future would be fraught with less danger than a Federal Council to-day; and of the latter all thoughtful men are afraid. The real bonds of Imperial unity are as close now as they could be under any formal scheme of federation; and the evolution of the Empire may very safely be left to the forces happily described by the unknown sage of South Australia. Let us beware lest that which some would fain mould into ordered shape be shattered in the moulding.

Art. II.-CHARLES DICKENS.

It is only when such names as Shakespeare's or Hugo's rise and remain as the supreme witnesses of what was highest in any particular country at any particular time that there can be no question among any but irrational and impudent men as to the supremacy of their greatest. England, under the reign of Dickens, had other great names to boast of which may well be allowed to challenge the sovereignty of his genius. But as there certainly was no Shakespeare and no Hugo to rival and eclipse his glory, he will probably and naturally always be accepted and acclaimed as the greatest Englishman of his generation. His first works or attempts at work gave little more promise of such a future than if he had been a Coleridge or a Shelley. No one could have foreseen what all may now foresee in the 'Sketches by Boz'-not only a quick and keen-eyed observer, 'a chiel amang us takin' notes' more notable than Captain Grose's, but a great creative genius. Nor could any one have foreseen it in the early chapters of 'Pickwick '—which, at their best, do better the sort of thing which had been done fairly well before. Sam Weller and Charles Dickens came to life together, immortal and twin-born. In 'Oliver Twist' the quality of a great tragic and comic poet or dramatist in prose fiction was for the first time combined with the already famous qualities of a great humorist and a born master in the arts of narrative and dialogue.

Like the early works of all other great writers whose critical contemporaries have failed to elude the kindly chance of beneficent oblivion, the early works of Dickens have been made use of to depreciate his later, with the same enlightened and impartial candour which on the appearance of 'Othello' must doubtless have deplored the steady though gradual decline of its author's genius from the unfulfilled promise of excellence held forth by 'Two Gentlemen of Verona.' There may possibly be some faint and flickering shadow of excuse for the dullards, if unmalignant, who prefer Nicholas Nickleby' to the riper and sounder fruits of the same splendid and inexhaustible genius. Admirable as it is, full of life and sap and savour,

the strength and the weakness of youth are so singularly mingled in the story and the style that readers who knew nothing of its date might naturally have assumed that it must have been the writer's first attempt at fiction. There is perhaps no question which would more thoroughly test the scholarship of the student than this:-What do you know of Jane Dibabs and Horatio Peltiogrus? At fourscore and ten it might be thought 'too late a week for a reader to revel with insuppressible delight in a first reading of the chapters which enrol all worthy readers in the company of Mr Vincent Crummles; but I can bear witness to the fact that this effect was produced on a reader of that age who had earned honour and respect in public life, affection and veneration in private. It is not, on the other hand, less curious and significant that Sydney Smith, who had held out against Sam Weller, should have been conquered by Miss Squeers; that her letter, which of all Dickens's really good things is perhaps the most obviously imitative and suggestive of its model, should have converted so great an elder humorist to appreciation of a greater than himself; that the echo of familiar fun, an echo from the grave of Smollett, should have done what finer and more original strokes of comic genius had unaccountably failed to do. But in all criticism of such work the merely personal element of the critic, the natural atmosphere in which his mind or his insight works, and uses its faculties of appreciation, is really the first and last thing to be taken into account.

No mortal man or woman, no human boy or girl, can resist the fascination of Mr and Mrs Quilp, of Mr and Miss Brass, of Mr Swiveller and his Marchioness; but even the charm of Mrs Jarley and her surroundings, the magic which enthrals us in the presence of a Codlin and a Short, cannot mesmerise or hypnotise us into belief that the story of 'The Old Curiosity Shop' is in any way a good story. But it is the first book in which the background or setting is often as impressive as the figures which can hardly be detached from it in our remembered impression of the whole design. From Quilp's Wharf to Plashwater Weir Mill Lock, the river belongs to Dickens by right of conquest or creation. The part it plays in more than a few of his books is indivisible from the parts played in them by human actors beside it or upon it. Of

such actors in this book, the most famous as an example of her creator's power as a master of pathetic tragedy would thoroughly deserve her fame if she were but a thought more human and more credible. The child' has never a touch of childhood about her; she is an impeccable and invariable portent of devotion, without a moment's lapse into the humanity of frailty in temper or in conduct. Dickens might as well have fitted her with a pair of wings at once. A woman might possibly be as patient, as resourceful, as indefatigable in well-doing and as faultless in perception of the right thing to do; it would be difficult to make her deeply interesting, but she might be made more or less of an actual creature. But a child whom nothing can ever irritate, whom nothing can ever baffle, whom nothing can ever misguide, whom nothing can ever delude, and whom nothing can ever dismay, is a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads.

Outside the class which excludes all but the highest masterpieces of poetry it is difficult to find or to imagine a faultless work of creation--in other words, a faultless work of fiction; but the story of Barnaby Rudge' can hardly, in common justice, be said to fall short of this crowning praise. And in this book, even if not in any of its precursors, an appreciative reader must recognise a quality of humour which will remind him of Shakespeare, and perhaps of Aristophanes. The impetuous and irrepressible volubility of Miss Miggs, when once her eloquence breaks loose and finds vent like raging water or fire, is powerful enough to overbear for the moment any slight objection which a severe morality might suggest with respect to the rectitude and propriety of her conduct. It is impossible to be rigid in our judgment of

'a toiling, moiling, constant-working, always-being-foundfault-with, never-giving-satisfactions, nor-having-no-time-toclean-oneself, potter's wessel,' whose 'only becoming occupations is to help young flaunting pagins to brush and comb and titiwate theirselves into whitening and suppulchres, and leave the young men to think that there an't a bit of padding in it nor no pinching-ins nor fillings-out nor pomatums nor deceits nor earthly wanities.'

To have made malignity as delightful for an instant as simplicity, and Miss Miggs as enchanting as Mrs Quickly