806 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 



his leisure by writing- novels, and a volume of sketches 

 called " Wauderino's in India." This last is now out of print ; 

 but I well remember several of the sketches. It resembles, 

 in originaUty and picturesque effect, nothing so much, in my 

 opinion, as those wonderful creations of the grandest artist of 

 day in that school of design, the splendidly meteoric, Rudyard 

 Kipling. His more completed productions, the " Ex-Wife," 

 "York, you're wanted,'' "Will he marry her?" and others, 

 were in their day highly successful, being admirably true to 

 the state of society, which they purposed to describe. These 

 all dealt with the men and manners of our eastern empire. 

 But in his most popular novel, "The Forger's Wife," the 

 scene is laid in Sydney in the old old days of transportation. 

 It is a ]DOwerful, if occasionally painful book. It sells even 

 now in all the colonies and in England by the thousand, and, 

 as is not uncommon in the history of authors and their best 

 productions, no relative of the late Mr. Lang has beneficial 

 interests in the copyright. 



The Hon. WilHam Forster, ex-Agent General for New 

 South V/ales, though to all intents and purposes an Australian, 

 was one of those Englishmen who in their infancy came to 

 Australia. Like his great contemporary Wentworth, he was 

 the son of an Irish army surgeon, belonging on the mother's 

 side to a race of Kentish squires. He adopted the fashionable 

 pastoral profession on attaining manhood, and had his share 

 of the dangers of the wilderness, though such were his strong 

 literary proclivities, combined with so combative and critical a 

 bent, that no circumstances would have estopped him from 

 intellectual conflict. His earlier literary efforts were directed 

 against the ruling policy of the day, and a jeu d'esprit 

 published in the Atlas newspaper, entitled " The Devil and 

 the Governor," is still remembered. Another satire, " The 

 Genie and the Ghost," followed. In a later day he wrote 

 poems, which, though of high order, were hardly calculated 

 to suit the popular taste. He deserted the domain of poetry 

 in his later years for the more absorbing triumphs of party 

 politics, where he obtained full recognition, alike by friend 

 and foe, as 



" In close fight a champion firm, 

 In camps a leader sage." 



Of unchallenged integrity, of exact and pitiless logic, faultless 

 in diction, elegant in versification, the name of William 

 Forster, as author and critic, will always be associated with 

 the literary movement of his day ; while his steadfast adherence 



