Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/395

 other measures. Every gallery in Europe has duplicates, which could be spared, if we offered them, as we might, stuffed animals and birds in exchange.

Read Rath Mueller's "Life of Alexander Hamilton"; a lively sketch, not overburthened with details, and not sacrificing others unduly to the hero. Indeed I was under the impression that Washington owed more to him as a prompter than is claimed for him here. Slang whangery began early in the United States; Hamilton, after an eminently honourable and useful public life, was habitually assailed by the democratic newspapers as if he had been one of the basest of men.

Re-read the Federalist. Dull, sensible writing, in a whitey-brown style—hard to read and hard to remember.

Marshal Wood, the sculptor, brought me introductions from London and I sent him to Marcus Clarke to ascertain whether the National Gallery could be of use to him.

He seems aware (says Clarke) that solid pudding is [sometimes] the accompaniment to empty praise, and by no means inclines to follow the precept of Ruskin, who says, "Art should be pursued alone, in sorrow, in poverty, and in suffering, practised in divine secret, without fee or hope of reward."

Mr. Wood found his visit to Victoria, on the whole, a success.

I employed the leisure furnished by the Parliamentary recess, to begin a work I had long projected—a history of my own time in Ireland, and a defence of the friends with whom I acted. The recess was spent at Nepean, separated from Melbourne by forty miles of sea, and where the hot winds, which are the plague of the city, after they passed over the long stretch of Hobson's Bay became almost genial. We spent Christmas here on a peninsula which on one side is lapped by the gentle waters of Hobson's Bay, and on the other lashed by the breakers of the Pacific, and bathing was a great enjoyment. One of my correspondents from Ireland declared it made her shudder to hear of baths in the sea, while she saw nothing about her but the snows of Christmas. But custom is the supreme ruler; my children bathed on the beach from which they can see the skeleton of a shark larger than a great bull-dog rotting on a sandbank, and they walk night and day without a thought of fear where we had once or twice killed snakes six feet long at midday. I explained my purpose to John O'Hagan in the following letter:—

I propose to write the rise and fall of the National Movement, which otherwise will probably never be written, and we, and our friends, will be for ever misunderstood. I might do some good in the House of Commons as you suggest, but surely I shall do more good in painting the sins