PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION I. 191 
and inan English magazine, I think the 4tene@um a most compli- 
mentary notice was given of his poems, the reviewer even quoting 
several of them at length. It is singular that in a recent (1886) 
local edition of the poet’s works, none of these pieces selected for 
favourable comment are included. In one of them I was much 
struck by the graphic rendering, in the space of a single line, of a 
moonlight effect, 
A white sail glimmers out at sea—a vessel walking in her sleep. 
The mystic and dreamy picture here so well presented is very 
characteristic of some moods of the writer. But although Kendall 
has secured for himself a permanent place on the roll of 
Australia’s poets, it is a subject for regret that his life was not 
further prolonged, and under circumstances more favourable for 
poetic work, for excellent as this is, the brilliant productions of 
his earlier years gave promise, I think, of something even still 
more so. The amount of.published poetry by other writers in 
Australasia is very considerable, as is evidenced by the large, and 
apparently exhaustive, collection on the shelves of the Public 
Library of this city. Before leaving this subject, I may observe 
it is a matter for congratulation that our future poets and 
dramatists must always have an equal and common share with 
their English brethren in that peerless exemplar already alluded 
to of all that is greatest and best in literature—Shakespeare ; of 
whom indeed many an enthusiastic student would probably 
venture to go even so far as to say :— 
Quo nihil majus meliusve terris 
Fata donavere, bonique Divi, 
Nec dabunt. 
It may, in fact, be a question if English writers have not in this 
respect an exclusive privilege. Other nations certainly have our 
poet in their own vernacular, but when we know how well-nigh 
impossible it is to give in a strange tongue a perfect reflex of any 
supreme poetry, with all the subtle cadence and music of the 
words first married by the poet himself to his imaginings, it is 
clear that any attempt to render the finer issues of Shakespeare 
by a translation must practically end in failure. It may be 
noted, too, that the very perfection of our great dramatist not 
only renders him virtually impossible to the translator, but has 
- probably the peculiar effect of preventing him from being even 
the founder of a school, as it has been well observed by an 
English writer: “If Shakespeare founded no school, that is 
because no school of Shakespeare is possible. It is only the 
artist whose perfections are not unapproachable who can found a 
school.” Here it may not be out of place to refer to an article in 
the Contemporary Review, of October, 1889, which must go far to 
convince even the most stubborn sceptic of the real personality 
of Shakespeare. The argument that the writer whom we know 
by that name could not, owing to defective scholarship, have 
