VICTORIA. 43 



spectacle is grateful to the banker. The capitalist will build a cottage home 

 in the one, but he will advance money freely on the acres of the other. The 

 gold-fields are the least picturesque of any portion of the Austral region, 

 though as gold-fields they possess a romance of their own. 



But, turning from the country to the town, we have first and foremost 

 that special pride of Victoria, the great city of Melbourne. Batman pro- 

 claimed the site ' a good spot for a village,' and the village has become a 

 metropolis. We give an engraving showing what Melbourne was like in 

 1 840, and as a contrast, one of a railway pier in the same city forty-six years 

 later. Its population of over 350,000 puts Melbourne into the rank of 

 the first score of the cities of the empire. And if area were considered as 

 the test, the city would not easily be surpassed, except by London itself, 

 for a ten miles' radius from the Post Office is required to cover it all. There 

 is much filling in to be done, of course, but Brighton, Oakleigh, Surrey Hills, 

 and other of the long distance suburbs have not only been built up to, but 

 are being passed by the spreading population. The city itself is a compact 

 mass of about a mile and a half square, encircled by large parks and gardens, 

 all the property of the people, and permanently reserved for their use. 

 Built upon a cluster of small rolling hills, the views of Melbourne are pleasantly 

 interrupted, and yet it is possible to obtain frequent glimpses from command- 

 ing points, either of the whole or of parts of the whole. You will turn a 

 corner and come upon a panoramic peep of streets, of sea and of spires that 

 takes one's breath away. Near Bishopscourt you have one of these ' coigns 

 of vantage.' You see the busy town below, and hear its hum. On the one 

 side are the suburbs where artisan and clerk and small tradesman have their 

 long rows of cottages and houses, costing from £100 to ,£2,000 each, while on 

 the other side are the high lands of Malvern and Toorak, where the success- 

 ful squatter, speculator, and storekeeper have erected mansions, standing in at 

 present prices from ^5,000 to ,£50,000. Government House, the residence 

 of His Excellency, the representative of the Crown, is a conspicuous object 

 to the south ; to the north is the handsome Exhibition Building, in which 

 the gathering of 1880 was held. Numerous places of amusement speak of 

 a pleasure-loving people. The two or three spires upon every hill proclaim 

 a Christian community not averse to spending money and making sacrifices 

 for its religion. There is no veneer. The cottage is usually of brick ; the 

 public buildings, from the twin cathedrals of the Roman and Anglican Churches 

 downwards, are of stone, which is costly here. The mushroom Melbourne 

 of 1857 has been exchanged for Mr. G. A. Sala's 'Marvellous Melbourne' 

 of the present year of grace, 1886. 



Melbourne streets are wide — a chain and a half or ninety-nine feet in all — 

 and they are busy. The shops seem ' squat ' to most visitors from the Old 

 World, for two stories high was the rule until within the last few years ; but as 

 the price of land goes up, so does the height of the buildings. Nothing would 



