He orated from the hearthrug, standing. “My dear child, I have read your book and discern in it germs of genius. If fostered and cultivated these may bear fruit in time.”

This was opposed to the point of view that marriage would take literary prankishness out of me.

“Of course you are very crude. Your workmanship does not exist. You must start from the a b c. I wish I could have the forming of your style. I don’t know of anyone else in these beastly Cawlonies who wouldn’t ruin you.”

“Do you think women ever could write?” I inquired in a very small voice.

“Madam,” said he, drawing his chest upwards and twirling his mustache, “the immortal Sappho was a woman.”

“Yes, but Shakespeare is claimed as a man. Men always say there is no female Shakespeare.”

“Humph! You study the fellows who say that, and you’ll see they are a long way from being Shakespeares themselves. Why shouldn’t women have the same privilege?”

Good for the old boy! After that I did not care how he strutted. He had won my affection.

“You’ll never do work that will live if you listen to your friends—so-called friends. They will gush over you and call you a genius. Don’t listen to them; and as for the literary talent of Australia, there is none. Unfortunately the literary men of Sydney are neither literary nor men. Even your University professors are only third-rate fellows —men who could never rise out of the ruck if they remained in England, so they came out here where they can lord it in a tin-pot circle.”

Mr. Wilting had stated that his health was the reason of his own exile.

“The wife of one of our Governors said there is no society in Australia,” I murmured.

“She was right. Neither is there any culture. Neither are there any literati. There is only a set of local cacklers unknown out of their own barn. You will quickly set in the same crude limitations unless you can gain a perspective. You must burst the bonds of your environment. In your childish ignorance you are over-awed by the tinkling horse-rhymes and bullock-driving jingles of these fellows. They are beneath consideration from a literary point of view. The crudeness of the average Australian is appalling—appalling! and his cocksureness prevents his improvement.”

In many a friendly bush home the more tender of the poems decried by this gentleman were copied by girls into their albums and were treasured as the only expression of familiar emotions and scenes, while the more rousing couplets were often on the lips of their brothers and gave a little colour to arid monotony as they ploughed, ring-barked, shore, milked and put up the heavy fences. Around the camp fires far out this gentleman could have heard the work of these poets he despised enlivening the bare nights of the unfurnished pioneer life. I plucked up courage to voice my conviction that in another generation or two these Australian ballads would be lauded as being as typically Colonial as Burns’s were Scottish. I held that our poets were our folklore-ists, and worthy of all the affection we gave them. I ventured to suggest that perhaps the English mind, to its loss, did not extract the essence of Australianism.