CHAPTER XI. 



THE EARLY ADMINISTRATION OF MR. LATROBE AS SUPER- 

 INTENDENT. 



CHABLES JOSEPH LATROBE, C.B., who, under the title of Super- 

 intendent of the Port Phillip district, discharged a Deputy-Governor's 

 functions from September, 1839, until the establishment of the 

 colony of Victoria in 1851, was a cultured, Christian gentleman, 

 the son of a Moravian minister in England, and originally educated 

 to follow his father's profession. Though but thirty-eight years of 

 age at the time of his arrival, he had travelled much in Europe and 

 America, and had published two or three volumes of his ramblings. 

 He had accompanied Washington Irving in that Tour on the Prairies 

 which helped to keep alive the glamour of romance that Fenimore 

 Cooper had cast around the Red Indians. Mr. Latrobe had aban- 

 doned the prospects of a career in the Church for an official life, 

 and having very satisfactorily executed a mission of inspection in 

 the West Indies, entrusted to Him by Lord Melbourne's Cabinet, 

 he was selected for the position at Port Phillip, the creation of 

 which had been so strongly recommended by Sir Richard Bourke. 



It is almost incredible that a man of Mr. Latrobe's placidly 

 amiable and unselfish character could have aroused such an amount 

 of bitter antagonism as he was destined to experience during his 

 Australian career. Doubtless it was these very qualities that brought 

 about his troubles. His fiercest detractors were forced to acknow- 

 ledge his high ideals of duty in private as in public life his delicate 

 courtesy to all, the self-denial involved in his many charities, and 

 the entire absence of any suspicion of greed, either of power or pelf. 

 But they did not understand the subtler refinements of his nature ; 

 the shrinking sensitiveness from giving pain or disappointment, the 

 timidity with which he questioned his own decisions, and the self- 



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