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As regards both the Dialogue and the Essays, I would like to point out that they are professedly didactic, and, as such, are of course cast into the form which I believe most calculated to achieve their object. I am sure that I have neither the intention nor the wish to impugn the competency of the australian Press to deal with things australian. I am myself a member, a very humble member of it, and am quite ready to do myself the sincere pleasure of praising it. At the same time I cannot blind myself to the fact that its criticism is not (let us say) ideal. The “business of criticism,” says the first of living critics, “is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” Well now, I cannot, I say, look upon this australian Press, of which I am so humble a member, as the creator of such a current; and, (I will make a clean breast of it at once!), bright and charming as I have always found him in the “Echoes of the Week” and places of like resort, I have viewed the triumphal approach of Mr. Sala to us, and his even more triumphal progress among us, with (as someone will presently be saying of me)—“with a jaundiced eye.” And why? The truth, the real truth, is, (May I be forgiven for saying so?), that I do not believe that even Mr. Sala can help us australian pressmen, (since I dare to place myself in a company which includes such stupendous personages as “The Vagabond” and the Editor of the Melbourne Herald), to create that “current of true and fresh ideas” to which we have alluded. Truth, alas, is the private property of no man—not even of Mr. George Augustus Sala. And I confess to finding myself at the point of wishing that, even for mere variety’s sake, we should hear more than we do of the ideas of such personages as Goethe, Emerson, Renan, Arnold, and so on: writers, of course, familiar to us all, and whom I, at any rate, must still continue to consider as not wholly exhausted. They may not have the depth of thought, the accuracy of detail, the exquisite tact of expression which distinguish the genial littérateur, and make his work, as one of my fellow pressmen said the other day, “epoch-making,” but I really do still continue—I must still continue—to think that, despite all these disadvantages, they are still capable of helping us a little to that critical haven where our souls would be—to the source of “a current of true and fresh ideas.”