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On one of the first afternoons I spent in Melbourne, I remember strolling into a well-known book-mart, the book-mart “at the sign of the rainbow.” I was interested both in the books and the people who were looking at or buying them. Here I found, almost at the London prices (for we get our twopence or threepence in the shilling on books now in London), all, or almost all, of the average London books of the day. The popular scientific, theological, and even literary books were to hand, somewhat cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that were buying them? The people of the dominant class, the middle-class. I began to enquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. “And how do Gordon’s poems sell?” “Oh they sell well,” was the answer, “he’s the only poet we’ve turned out.”

This pleased me, it made me think that the “go-ahead” element in Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If, in a similar book-mart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than the name would have been recognized. And yet the middle-class here is as, and perhaps more, badly—more appallingly badly—off for a higher education than the English provincial middle class is. Whence comes it, then, that a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with his sad “trust and only trust,” and his