Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/152

 would not, I conceived, be a bad security for my becoming a good Australian in my new one." I added, regarding the principles of public liberty which I held, that I was a Radical reformer, but I was no more a Red Republican, as some one alleged, than a Red Indian.

Melbourne, which is now a handsome and picturesque city, was then a thriving village, in the by-streets of which primeval trees or their stumps might still be seen, and where huge chasms sometimes interrupted communication between adjoining streets. The public buildings were ultra-provincial, the Government offices were a two-storey villa, the law offices occupied a vacant corn store, the Public Works department was housed in a wooden shanty; but some progress had been made with an ambitious Custom House, and the young community had built a creditable Public Library and Museum, and the foundations and class-rooms of a University. The Legislative Council met in a small brick building known as St. Patrick's Hall, hired from the St. Patrick's Irish Society; but a new Parliament House was planned, on so great a scale that after forty years it is not yet finished.

The public library was as yet strangely unfit for its position in the capital of a new country. All the great eras of history were blank. There was not a single book on the English Commonwealth, but Clarendon and an anonymous Life of Cromwell, nor on the American Revolution but Bancroft, or on the French Revolution but Thiers, or on the Bonapartean era but the spiteful and libellous memoirs of Bourrienne. There was not a single volume on Australian affairs, and political economy was ignored. The modern poets were represented by Samuel Rogers and a single poem of Tennyson's. The modern novelists stopped with Scott. The philosophers were nowhere. Carlyle, Landor, Browning, Helps, John Wilson, De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Henry Taylor, Cornewall Lewis and Thackeray were not to be found. But the antiquities of Athens and Attica were abundantly represented. Three hundred volumes of Greek and Latin classics and the Book of Common Prayer in German, French, Italian, Greek, modern Greek, and Spanish; twelve volumes of the Bridgewater Treatises and their antithesis, Hobbs in