As regards both the Dialogue and the Essays, I would like to point out that they are professedly didactic, and, as such, are of course cast into the form which I believe most calculated to achieve their object. I am sure that I have neither the intention nor the wish to impugn the competency of the australian Press to deal with things australian. I am myself[x] a member, a very humble member of it, and am quite ready to do myself the sincere pleasure of praising it. At the same time I cannot blind myself to the fact that its criticism is not (let us say) ideal. The “business of criticism,” says the first of living critics, “is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.”

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