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Gordon’s life and work were a failure. He himself would, I am sure, have been the first to admit it and have assigned the cause, and rightly, to bad luck in general and certain failings in himself in particular. Is it not bad luck to be born into an age that makes of its poets its martyrs? Gordon struggled and schemed. He was a livery-stable keeper, a landowner, a member of assembly, a keeper of racehorses, and a failure in all. It was only as jockey and stockrider that he was a success—that is to say, an object of admiration to others and of happiness to himself. “He sometimes,” says Mr. Woods, “compared the lot of a bushman with that of other states of mankind, saying that it was in many ways preferable to any one,” and for himself he was right. Let us not lament his failure in what he was not meant to be a success. Gordon, happy in life and love, might well have become at best a dilettante, at worst a materialized blockhead, he has so little patience, so little clear-sightedness! Perhaps it is, after all, better as it is. The axe cuts down the sandal tree, and the tree sheds forth its perfume.