craves the indulgence of the reader in informing that important personage that the ordinary duties of a reporter on a daily morning paper are not luxuriously light, and that the compilation of the following narrative has been a refreshing appendage to the daily discharge of such ordinary duties, plus a bracing exercise of sub-editorial function. He has, no doubt, amply vindicated Bolingbroke's accurate apothegm, and especially in this preface. Both preface and narrative may be regarded as a verbose exaggeration of the importance of the subject. The answer to that is, that the writer has written mainly for those who know the place, and, knowing it, are proud of it; for those who believe in the future in reserve for it, for the colony to which it belongs to-day, and for the empire of which it some day may be a not altogether unimportant portion.
In the City of York, where memory and fancy, busy with the records and the remains of the past, make of the softened lights and shadows and many-colored figures of mediæval English history an inexpressible charm, the glorious Minster rises over all supreme in its solemn and saintly beauty. Whatever pilgrim there has studiously perused that marvellous " poem in stone" may have seen over one of the doorways the work of some loving and pious egotist in the following inscription:—"Ut rosa flos florum, sic tu es domus domorum." Let us be permitted, with similar egotism, if not with equal piety, to inscribe here, as over one of the portals of approach to one of the golden fields and cities of Victoria:—Ut aurum metallorum pretiosissimum, sic tu es camporum aureorum princeps, urbiumque opulentissima.
W. B. W.
- Ballarat, 22nd June, 1870.
