thing than was possible at first. We are at last settled in a home after most herculean labour in arguing and bargaining. It is a very cheap one for this country, only 130l. a year. It is all front, with a very pretty view of Port Jackson, the Heads and the lighthouse. The air is excellent, and the mosquitos not nearly so bad as in lower situations. They are not really as tormenting as the midges were in Scotland. Our establishment consists of Martha, who is every day improving in health from this most excellent climate, a man-servant and a kitchen-maid. The man-servant we would gladly have dispensed with, but in this town where there are no water-pipes, the carrying water ourselves is a great economy, and a man is wanted to clean out and take care of my chambers. Our furniture is all unpacked and arranged; it has come, upon the whole, exceedingly well, and had it not been for the abominable carelessness of the abominable man who packed it, we should have had no losses: the Aden was so extremely dry in the hold. The drawings are quite safe and all my books. In this country, where the rooms are not papered, but the walls and ceilings are left in stucco, a few pictures framed are something more than ornamental.

The weather has been on the whole very pleasant; during the first two months no rain fell, and very considerable injury was done to the crops and fruit, although more rain fell during the year than in England; yet from the peculiarity of the country, the absence of river drainage, and the presence of immense masses of sandstone rock which reflect the heat of almost a tropical sun, one day of fine weather does more to dry than two or three of rain do to moisten it. At Sydney, also, from its proximity to the sea, a very strong land or sea breeze is continually blowing, which assists the drying influence of the sun. The heat is seldom or never overpowering, and the mornings and nights are uniformly cool. On Sunday, January 8, the thermometer was 118° in the shade and 142° in the sun, yet we bore this perfectly well, and have often been more uncomfortable on a summer's day in England. We spent a few days at Government House, Paramatta, last week, the pears in some parts of the garden had literally been baked on one side on the trees by the hot wind, presenting not only the appearance, but the taste of the oven. A standard nectarine tree laden with fruit is a beautiful sight; we are just in the height of the peach and nectarine season, and enjoy ourselves accordingly. A bushel of delicious nectarines is to be bought for 3s., as fine in flavour as any I ever ate in England. The peaches are as good as the general run of this fruit in England.

I am sorry to say that my eyes have grown so much worse, indeed so nearly useless to me, that I have been obliged most unwillingly to place myself under medical advice, and to debar myself from reading

and writing altogether. Mr. Bland,' who is my doctor, attributes my inability to read, not to weakness of the eyes, but to an incipient tic douloureux which has been coming on for several years and which threatens, if not corrected, to be of a most severe description, menacing not only my sight, but eventually life. He entertains great hopes of being able to subdue this disorder, and has taken tolerably stringent measures for that purpose, by cupping, calomel, belladonna, &c., and a very strict regimen and low diet. I think he has done me some good and trust he may do more. I have got a very good clerk, who does literally all my reading and writing. I pay him 21. a week.

This visitation is the more difficult to bear as, professionally speaking, I have been getting on exceedingly well, having made at least 100l. since my arrival in the colony. Times are extremely bad here; there have been upwards of 600 insolvencies in ten months, and law business has much diminished even since my arrival, but if my health will only permit, I do not fear getting my share. I am the junior barrister at this Bar, which is an advantage, and have already been concerned in one case for the defendant in which the plaintiff received a verdict for 1,200l. I have as yet had no opportunity of making a speech. We have now had more chance of seeing what the society here is. Upon the whole I think it very good, people are so much more liberal, so much less bigoted and narrow-minded than in England. The ladies are not handsome, and those educated in the colony stupid, but of the rest everybody has seen something beyond the common routine of daily life in England and is rendered more agreeable accordingly.

The rest of the letter is concerned with the political outlook of the colony, and is exceedingly characteristic, as are the views expressed of the social condition of the people.

We have just received our new Constitution, and everybody is very busy about the contested elections. The franchise is 207. per annum, a qualification in this country of high rents far lower than that of England, amounting, indeed, to universal suffrage, and that in an ignorant, lazy, vicious, and degraded community, the very last in the world who ought to enjoy it. . . . The result might have been very different had a better class of emigrants been sent out, for the free

'The political colleague of Wentworth, afterwards defeated by Lord Sherbrooke for the representation of Sydney.

2 Lord Sherbrooke lived to modify this opinion. the peculiar bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the human weaknesses cropped up in a different guise.

Doubtless he did not find Oxford clericals, but these

population is to the convict in the proportion of 25 to 3. But the majority of the persons sent out here have been selected for their uselessness in their mother country, as if there were any inherent virtue in the Southern Hemisphere which could turn incorrigible rogues into industrious labourers. Anyone with the wish and power to work may, even in these bad times, soon rise to independence. Stone-masons earn 9s. per day, very indifferent carpenters 7s., so there is no lack of inducement to emigration, but these people all seem to consider that to work was the only thing for which they were not sent out, and they are uniformly dissatisfied with their lot, and wish themselves back in England, although they allow they live in plenty and independence here, and would be starved or go into a workhouse there.

My total inability to write with my own hand, and the constant occupation which getting into our house has necessarily afforded to my wife, must be my excuse for not writing sooner. I trust it is not an excuse I shall have to offer again, but I have no idea how long a time may elapse before I am permitted to use my eyes again.

With best wishes to all my kind and dear friends in England, Believe me theirs very truly,

ROBERT LOWE.

This was written, as he says, three months after his arrival, and so forms a fitting introduction to his future active life and public career in the colony. But we now come to a very sad interlude, which is, indeed, foreshadowed in the close of this letter.

CHAPTER X

A PERIOD OF GLOOM

Threatened Blindness-Bush Wanderings-Tribute to W. S. MacleayReturn to the Bar

In writing the concluding lines of the foregoing letter, Robert Lowe little dreamt that within less than a month all his bright hopes of professional success would have flown, and he would be warned by his colonial doctors that unless he entirely ceased to use his eyes he would almost immediately become stone-blind. It is difficult to imagine a harder fate for a man conscious of such great mental powers, and with so much intellectual activity. He had been driven from England by the warnings of eminent medical authorities, who had declared that he might preserve his partial and painful eyesight as a colonist in Australia; now, within a few months of his arrival, he was told that unless he abandoned his profession he must inevitably become blind at once. Considering the mental torture that these fallacious and equally dogmatic verdicts must have caused the patient, it is not to be wondered at that in after years he should have recorded a severe condemnation of such empiricism; for, despite these prognostications, as all the world knows, Lord Sherbrooke contrived to achieve success in his profession, and eminence as a statesman, without any material injury to his dim eyesight. In later years, reviewing this frightful experience in Sydney, it will be remembered, he made these comments :

The prophecies of my three Job's comforters [his London

doctors] had made me very nervous about my eyes. I suffered somewhat from the glare of an Australian summer, Sydney being one of the most dazzling places in the world, and in an evil hour I consulted a doctor. He cupped me and advised me that it was absolutely necessary that I should discontinue my practice, which was rapidly increasing. I doubt if I should have been so docile to my Sydney Esculapius if his opinion had not tallied with the opinions of the London doctors. The time is come, I said to myself, sooner than I thought, and if I do not wish to be wholly blind I must give up my business. This was the lowest ebb of my fortunes. It really seemed as if I was destined to sink into a situation in which I should look back with regret on the position it had cost me so much trouble to quit. To make the thing complete I was forbidden to read, so that all that remained to me was to forget what I had learnt, enlivened by the joyless dignity to starve.'

This enforced idleness accounts for the apparent failure in the early part of his career in Sydney, which astonished Mr. David Blair, the compiler of The Cyclopædia of Australasia. But the fact that for the next six or eight months the name of Robert Lowe did not appear in the Law Reports does not mean, as Mr. Blair supposes, that the colonial attorneys were slow to recognise Lord Sherbrooke's abilities; but that he had been compelled by mistaken medical advice to abandon the pursuit of his profession altogether. How he contrived to exist during these succeeding months of compulsory and anxious inactivity is related very fully in the affectionate letters which Mrs. Lowe sent 'home' regularly. Some of these are very interesting, giving, as they do, descriptions of the various places to which she accompanied him with a view of whiling away the time that would otherwise have lagged so heavily. From the first of these letters we see that the colonial doctors were very peremptory in their injunctions, and left the patient no choice unless he had elected utterly to ignore their advice and to take the consequences.