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September, 1885.

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It is difficult to speak of Melbourne fitly. The judgment of neither native nor foreigner can escape the influence of the phenomenal aspect of the city. Not fifty years ago its first child, Batman’s, was born; not forty, it was a city; a little over thirty, it was the metropolis of a colony; and now (as the inscription on Batman’s grave tells us) “Circumspice!” To natives their Melbourne is, and is only, “the magnificent city, classed by Sir George Bowen as the ninth in the world,” “one of the wonders of the world.” They cannot criticise, they can only praise it. To a foreigner, however, who, with all respect and admiration for the excellencies of the Melbourne of to-day as compared with the Melbourne of half-a-century ago, has travelled and seen and read, and cares very little for glorifying the amour-propre of this class or of that, and very much for really arriving at some more or less accurate idea of the significance of this city and its civilization; to such a man, I say, the native melodies in the style of “Rule Britannia” which he hears everywhere and at all times are distasteful. Nay, he may possibly have at last to guard himself against the opposite extreme, and hold off depreciation with the one hand as he does laudation with the other!