moleskin breeks, and riding boots in the streets, the passing country farmer, with wife and children perched a-top of the produce, make you feel that you are undoubtedly in Australia.

In one thing Brisbane excels. It has the most sensible Parliament buildings of all the Colonies-handsome and elegant, without the overdone ornateness of the Melbourne Chambers, and unpretentious, without the poverty-stricken appearance of the Sydney Houses of Legislature. Its Acclimatisation grounds and Botanic Gardens the first maintained with praiseworthy perseverance by a private society, and the second a Government reserve-have the advantage of being able to grow many tropical rarities that have no chance of life farther south. On the whole, Brisbane always seems to agreeably disappoint the stranger, and well it might. It is a homely city, none the worse because it is in fashionable pretensions behind Sydney, in the same ratio as Sydney is behind Melbourne. When the summer is showery, as the summer of 1878-9 has been, no one has cause to say that Brisbane is not a pleasant place, and of its healthiness at all times there is no question.

Of Adelaide I am unable to say anything from personal knowledge; but those who have visited it, especially in the spring and autumn, are entranced with the beauty of its parks, wide, straight streets, and the distant mountains, which bound the horizon some eight or ten miles from the city. It is no uncommon thing to hear gentlemen who are well acquainted with all the Australian towns give Adelaide in many respects priority of preference.

Although Tasmania is divided from Australia by Bass's Straits, it may still, for the purposes of this article, be considered part and parcel of the great island-continent. The visitor to Australia should go to Tasmania, and, if possible, New Zealand. With New Zealand I do not propose at the present time to meddle; but a glance at Hobart Town may well come within the compass of a description of some of the Australian capitals. There is a regular and comfortable steam service from Sydney to Hobart Town direct; and there is another service from Melbourne to Launceston, which affords the traveller an opportunity of journeying by rail from north to south of Tasmania.

Hobart Town is a delightful little metropolis. Its harbour is almost as beautiful as that of Sydney, save that the hills and promontories are not so freely studded with picturesque residences. A navy could safely ride in the estuary of the Derwent, and nothing can exceed the harmonious conjunction of its promontories and bays, and stately background of wooded hills and mountains. Hobart Town itself is a clean, quiet city, with good streets, substan

tial houses, and English-looking fruit and flower gardens; and it is magnificently situated, not only because it is built on the edge of a delightful harbour, but because immediately behind it rises, keeping unceasing watch and ward, the giant of these parts, Mount Wellington. The town reposes humbly and in perfect confidence absolutely under its shade, and the big fellow mixes himself up in all the public and private concerns of the place. The inhabitants cannot shake him off. Let them journey in what direction they choose, somehow there is the eye of Mount Wellington upon them. Indeed, you might almost imagine that the mood of Hobart Town depends not a little upon the mood of the mountain. When the summit is swathed in folds of cloud, it seems hushed; when the pinnacle is holding all the sunshine it can catch, and flashing it back again, it is glad; when it puts on an extra mantle of snow, it is felt to be winter. Hobart Town, and indeed the whole of Tasmania, may be said to be the garden of Australia. All English fruits grow luxuriantly, and the English trees and English manners and customs may well make the Englishman fancy that he is at home.

The club is necessarily an institution greatly favoured in the Colonies. The squatter coming down from the station prefers the club to the hotel, which is too often a place of entertainment admitting of enormous improvement. He knows that in its dining and smoking rooms, and in the lounging chairs of its verandahs, he will meet his brother pastoralist and the merchants and bankers residing in the town, or, like himself, birds of passage. It, to a great extent, takes the place of the reading room, or exchange. It is the haunt of merchants and politicians, and, generally speaking, of men who know what is wagging in the world. In Melbourne, club life assimilates to the London style as much as it can. In Sydney, the "old identities" have their club, and the younger generation theirs. In Brisbane there is a squatters' club, and a club chiefly managed by the heads of departments in the civil service and professional men. The only two clubs sacred to the wants of literary men, journalists, and Bohemians proper, are the Yorick club in Melbourne, which has acquired a handsome property of its own; and the Johnsonian club in Brisbane, which has been recently established in the interests of literature, art, science, and the drama. The newspapers of the Colonies are admirably conducted; and some of the weekly journals, such as the Australasian in Melbourne, the Mail and the Town and Country Journal in Sydney, the Queenslander and Week in Brisbane, are as much magazine as newspaper, and deserve the large circulation they obtain.

REDSPINNER.

THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE AND

As

MONSIEUR ZOLA.

S far as English authorship is concerned, the theatrical season, now coming to a close, has been distinguished by failure. It is true that Mr. Godfrey, the author of Mab, has written a piece not unworthy of his promise; and written it in the crisp tone which was pleasant in that earlier comedy. Mr. Valentine Prinsep, too-by way of exercising his skill in an art other than his own-by way of holding his rank in that new Renaissance of ours; one of whose "notes" it is to demand diversity, quite as much as excellence, of achievement has brought out a comedietta fairly fitted for the genial actors of charades, to whose care he committed it. Then again, Mr. Byron, at the Vaudeville, is probably on the road to success with The Girls he has filled the piece with what are about the smartest sayings now to be heard in London. But, on the whole, the season has been failure for authorship. Mr. Wills is a poet, and he has often had some difficulty in being a playwright. Mr. Gilbert is a playwright, who has had some difficulty in being a poet.

We have turned then, and had need to turn, more than ever to France at a time which has given us on the English stage only one thing completely worthy of remembering the enlightened control of a great London theatre by our most considerable actor. We owe much to Mr. Irving, and his management of the Lyceum is as full of promise as it is of performance. For the moment, he has not offered us much that is new, though much that is excellent. Most of what has been hitherto unfamiliar to the London theatre-goer has come, this year, from Paris. The Comédie Française in still in our midst, giving us the piece that is old, and the piece that is new, and the piece that is old-fashioned, because it is of yesterday instead of to-day. And we have also-at the Princess's-our first taste of M. Émile Zola-the strong wine of M. Zola duly watered for the beginner-the sensationalism that we do not refuse adroitly substituted for the crude truths we are too squeamish to bear. And with the advent of these things from France, and the welcome given

them, we have been told that the entire superiority of the French stage is too readily granted-too foolishly and inconsiderately allowed.

As to the Comédie Française, there is no doubt at all that London Society has erred on the side of exaggeration. But since when did not society exaggerate the virtues of the thing it approved of? What might have been a reasonable taste, has become a mania. The unlearned and the unpractised have always snatched at the celebrity of a name the many have followed with a too stupid unanimity where the few have led. Molière-unread yesterday-shares to-day the popularity of Hawley Smart and Miss Broughton. Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt rouses the contagious excitement which, two or three years since, would never have been felt. It was reserved for Rossi and Salvini in those days: yet in those days Sarah Bernhardt was precisely as great a genius and precisely as accomplished an artist as she is at this moment. Then there has been a difficulty in seating the latest converts to her talent-a discreet selection of the means to insure a popular success has had its reward; and the would-be amateur, who had often hurried through Paris to the Engadine, without seeing Sarah Bernhardt for six-and-sixpence in the Rue Richelieu, has clamoured to offer a couple of guineas to see the top of her bonnet, and nothing of her art, in the Strand. Undoubtedly the rush of the moment has assumed the dimensions of a folly. As you cannot see the art of Sarah Bernhardt from the last seat of the pit, or the hottest nook of the gallery, it is better not to go into the theatre to force an emotion which you have no opportunity to feel. So much for the exaggerated effort to see, under impossible conditions, a delightful artist. It is not the best way to enjoy the excellence of the stage of France, nor to know wherein its superiority lies. A much more crushing evidence of the general fineness of the art in France-its comparative poverty in Englandis afforded by a pilgrimage to L'Assommoir at the Ambigu, and a visit to Drink at the Princess's.

To begin with, it is necessary to say of the work of M. Zola that it suffered first of all, and even in Paris, by transfer to the stage. As the labour of a serious, though often a mistaken artist in literature, it lost greatly in the drama of Messrs. Busnach and Gastineau. As far as these gentlemen thought fit to alter it, it lost its balance, its reasonableness, its natural sequence, and it became a big melodrama. To see that this was so, it is necessary to know the outline of its story, or at all events the motive of the story-the gradual degradation of the Parisian labourer and his family through drink. One Gervaise,

a peasant girl of Arles, is utterly enamoured of some gay scoundrel, Lantier, a hat-maker, and comes with him to Paris, where she stays devoted to him wholly-of busy and frugal life and modest ambition. He seeks other women, and especially a rival, “la grande Virginie;" comes back from her one morning, hardly to be upbraided by Gervaise, but on a trumpery pretext packs his trunk and leaves the quiltwork girl who is faithful to him; sends the key of their lodging to her when she has gone to her work and he has emptied the room of his belongings and called a cab to take him to Virginie for a more lengthened sojourn. There follows in the novel the great scene of the lavoir, where the rivals meet: one crushed and maddened; the other hard and triumphant. They fall to upon each other with water pails, brushes, and hands, and the "grande Virginie," beating a retreat at last, is made a permanent enemy. Gervaise recovers her head, summons moral courage, and, quite alone, goes on her difficult way of steady work and simple life in the town. Presently she accepts one Coupeau, an honest mason; lives with him in some fifth floor of obscure Paris an almost idyllic life. A child is born to them; they work and plan for the child's future, heartily-steadfastly, in the light French people's way. At last, however, a bad accident happens to the man he falls from a scaffolding, and is disabled for weeks. Then the passion for drink, which he had hitherto never felt, comes to him-bred of enforced idleness, the complete change in his life: then confirmed by a half-voluntary idleness. He, too, drinks brandy, like his fellows, at the sign of L'Assommoir. He is only very gradually, very slowly degraded; but the steps, though tardy, are entirely sure. Gervaise struggles-bears up-earns money for both-keeps the child decent. But the natural end will come. At last, her husband perfectly besotted, she too, in poverty, and after many privations, finds the comfort of the bottle. For her, too, the brandy bottle is a "brave god," and the vicious drink of L'Assommoir "celestial liquor.". Coupeau dies of delirium tremens. Nana, the daughter, is in fair training for the streets. Gervaise, weary and debauched, dies one bitter night on the outer Boulevard.

They have changed this a good deal too much in the playeven in the French play at the Ambigu. What happened naturally, happened truly, in the novel, happens in the drama through the malicious agency of the "grande Virginie." It is she who encourages

or suffers the honest mason to mount the insecure scaffolding; she who pursues Coupeau and Gervaise with her evil acts, glories in their degradation, and sends in Coupeau's last hour-when there seemed one chance left-a bottle of brandy in wilful secret substitution for