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Of the first I have only to say that, so far as I can see, its claims are satisfied, satisfied as well as in a large city, and in a city of the above-mentioned composition, they can be. But of the second, of the claims of intellect and knowledge, what enormous room for improvement there is! What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge as, at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or rather the one great educated upper-class, of France.

There is still the other claim, that of beauty and manners. And it is here that your Australian, your Melbourne civilization is, I think, most wanting, is most weak; it is here that one feels the terrible need of “a past, a story, a poet to speak to you.” With the Library are a sculpture gallery and a picture gallery. What an arrangement in them both! In the sculpture gallery “are to be seen,” we are told, “admirably executed casts of ancient and modern sculpture, from the best European sources, copies of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, and other productions from the European Continent.” Yes, and Summers stands side by side with Michaelangelo! And poor busts of Moore and Goethe come between Antinous and the Louvre Apollo the Lizard slayer! But this, it may be said, is after all only an affair of an individual, the arranger. Not altogether so. If an audience thinks that a thing is done badly, they express their opinion, and the failure has to vanish. And how large a portion of the audience of Melbourne city, pray, is of opinion that quite half of its architecture is a failure, is hideous, is worthy only, as architecture, of abhorrence? how many are shocked by the atrocity of the Medical College building at the University? how many feel that Bourke Street, taken as a whole, is simply an insult to good taste?