David Christie Murray

“ The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world, missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. ”

“ Federation is on all accounts to be desired, but it has yet to be fought for, and will only be gained with difficulty. Wise men long for it, but the petty jealousies of rival states will hold it back from its birth-time as long as delay is possible. How infinitesimally small these jealousies are nothing short of a residence in the land can teach anybody. Wisdom will have its way in the long run, but the belief of the veteran leader of New South Wales, that he will live to see the union of the Australian colonies, is a dream. It is a dream which only his political enemies will grudge him. ”

“ One would barely encounter a working miner at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. ”

“ It is not unnatural perhaps that a man trained in English journalism and having worked in every grade of it should esteem it highly. But allowing all I can for personal prejudice and striving to look impartially upon it and its rivals, I am compelled to think it far and away the best in the world. In Australia the high traditions of the parent Press are preserved, and among many strange and novel and perplexing signs one can but gratefully and hopefully recognise the splendid enterprise and the lofty sense of public obligation which guide the youngest school of journalism in the world. ”

“ When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living—the whole world was rotten and wrong—and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's Golden Legend, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. ”

“ Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of echoes and voices. Gone.
A buffet at Oxford, and an instantaneous glimpse of people scalding their throats with an intolerable decoction called coffee extract. The figure of an imperious guard with a waving lamp. The vision of a stampede. Gone. Then an interlude of sleep, during which an orchestra plays dream music, with a roll, roll, roll of wheels as a musical groundwork to the theme. ”

“ The Australian working man is the best fed, the best paid, the best housed, and the least worked of all the workers of the world. In the great towns house rent is dear, much dearer than it has a right to be in so new and so wide a country. This is the consequence of the rush for secularisation and the ensuing neglect of the resources of the land. Clothing is dear as the consequence of protective imposts. The Australian working man is a staunch protectionist, being somehow persuaded that it is essential to his interests that he should suffer for the benefit of his only enemy, the middleman. ”

“ Hope looks so sure, that what Australia wants and has not it seems self-evident in a little while she will have. And so she might if she would go the right way for it, and instead of keeping three-quarters of her sparse inhabitants in towns, would take the work that lies before her nose and subdue the land and replenish it; and instead of shutting the gates deliberately on rival labour, would draw the stranger to her coasts and pour population on vast tracts of land which now lie barren and unproductive, but only wait for the hand of man to break into beauty and yield riches. ”

“ As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. ”

“ I have addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in the art of administration.
I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling, seething cauldron called journalism. ”

“ The great-hearted, big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a trail behind him. ”

“ I was confidently assured in Australia that I might see New Zealand thoroughly in the course of a two months' trip, and when I set out to visit it, it was my purpose not to extend my stay greatly beyond that limit. In effect, I found a year all too litde for my purpose. The physical aspects of the country alone are so extraordinary and delightful that a lover of nature finds it hard to withdraw himself from the influence of their charm. New Zealanders delight to speak of their country as the Wonderland of the South. They are justified, and more than justified. ”

“ Forbes greeted me boisterously, and, springing from his seat, clapped me upon the back. He took me to his friends and introduced me with words that put me to the blush. “Here,” said he, “is a man who writes English, and here is the only man who ever beat me on my own ground.” “No,” I answered, “it was my ground, Mr Forbes, and I should not have beaten you if you had spoken the language of the natives.” I never had a better or more generous friend than Forbes.
The World Journal, founded by Edmund Yates, was just then entering into its first dawn of success. ”

“ Is not Despondency disposed to state her case somewhat too emphatically? Am I, or am I not, flatly exaggerating in this summary of losses? Would I have the little child-wife back again if I could? Can her loss after this lapse of well nigh two score years have left anything, at most, but a humanising tenderness in my memory? She is a pretty and engaging recollection, and has been no more at any time for whole decades, and to pretend that she is a grief is frankly to import humbug into sentiment. ”

“ The professional critics have never been just to Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It has long seemed to me that The Cloister and the Hearth is, in fiction, the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he said one thing about that immortal book which I have ever since thought memorable. ”

“ The patriotic prejudice goes everywhere. It lives at the very roots of life. Truthful men will tell you that London is vilely supplied with cabs in comparison with Melbourne. They believe it. They will tell you that the flavours of English meats, game, fruits and vegetables are vastly inferior to those they know at home. And they believe it. To the unprejudiced observer Melbourne is the worst cabbed city in the world, or amongst the worst. A gourmet would find a residence in Australia a purgatory. ”

“ The colonists are perhaps curiously tender to the feeling of the mother country and they resent this indifference. It is difficult to express the varying sentiments of a community, but in many respects the Australia of to-day resembles the America which Charles Dickens saw on his first visit. There is an eager desire to ascertain the opinion of the passing English visitor, and this exists inexplicably enough even amongst the people who despise the visitor, and the land from which he comes. They ask for candour, but they are angry if you do not praise. ”

“ The great journals of Melbourne and Sydney are models of newspaper conduct, and are nowhere to be surpassed for extent and variety of information, for enterprise, liberality, and sound adhesion to principle, or for excellence of sub-editorial arrangement, or for force, justice, and exactness in expression. It is not only in the greater centres that the Press owns and displays these admirable characteristics. Adelaide, Brisbane, Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington have each journals of which no city in the world need be ashamed ”

“ Carlyle tore the hat savagely from his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees, embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. ”

“ I tasted in Adelaide a favourable specimen of the wild turkey, and I believe it to be the noblest of game birds. Its flavour is exquisite and you may carve at its bounteous breast for quite a little army of diners. And the remembrance of one friendly feast puts me in mind of many. Is there anywhere else on the surface of our planet a hospitality so generous, so free and boundless, as that extended to the stranger in Australia? ”

“ Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries ”

“ Here at the Antipodes we have founded a democracy, and in a democracy the government motto should be nonintervention. The unionist workmen roared with indignation at countless meetings. Why were not the shearers allowed to settle the dispute their own way? Why were the poor men to be threatened, intimidated, bullied by armed force? A continent cried shame. When, in that eight hours' procession to which I have already twice referred the shearers' deputation rode by, they were received with rolling applause all along the line, and a free people cheered the victims of oppression. ”

“ The air is thick with the shadows of regret. It is seventeen years since I shot my first wild boar, and more than fifteen since the last deer; a stag of twelve tines, as I am a christened man, fell to my gun. It is thirteen years since I rode into the central pah of the King's Country in New Zealand, and I have never crossed a horse since then. It is a quarter of a century since I saw the heights of Tashkesen, and heard the Turkish and Russian guns roaring defiance at each other; and the sporting days, and the exploring days, and the fighting days are all over. ”

“ Crash! came a shell in front of me as I entered, and this time nearer than ever. Now it is one thing to be in imminent danger in the midst of your comrades or even when you have the companionship of a single friend, and it is another to find yourself surrounded by a ring of fire when you are absolutely alone and have nobody to lend you countenance. The memory of that time will always make me pitiful to the man who runs away. ”

“ They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the Princess Clælia, from the mijaurée of the Tête D'Or to the tired and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent, placed over him.
He was always fighting against some legal oppression. ”