"PEERYBINGLE" ON TROLLOPE ON VICTORIA.

Evening Star, Issue 3227, 24 June 1873, Page 3

"PEERYBINGLE" ON TROLLOPE ON VICTORIA.

“In Melbourne,” says Trollope, “there is an Irish and there is a Chinese quarter ” “ Victoria, with her 750,000 souls, has a good daily newspaper. . . . Melbourne also has a weekly paper.”—“ The maid-servant in Victoria has the pertqess, the independence, the mode of asserting by her manner that rhough she brings you up your hot water, she is just as good as you.”—“ The young iady will do her duty by her father and mother, but she does i. as a superior person attending on those who are inferior.”—“ Attention is paid after a fashion that seems to imply that old folks, in the arrangement of life, should not interfere with their betters who are young.”—“ I will not call them (the Australian girls) Gonerils and Kegans, but I have seen old men who have put me in mind of Lear,” And so on and so forth, Girls. Trollope charges two-and-six for all these charges, and a great many more. Catch him alive, and toss the dear man in a blanket; but be advised by an old fooi, and don’t gush over old fools for the future, especially if they write novels. When a man’s been at that

game for a life-time, he’s apt to show his false teeth at you, and mix his facts with an overdose of fiction, although, as you might say of the Ladies’ Improver, the fiction is founded on some fact. (This joke’s about 145 years old, so don’t pass it off as fresh.) Victoria has a daily paper, and Melbourne has a weekly paper, says this fiction-mongering Trollope. He ought to have gone on to say that Melbourne has one hotel where the “ distinguished novelist” shouted drinks to himself ; that Melbourne has one low-backed car, that the distinguished one rode in; one theatre that ho patronised ; one tailor where he got the holes in his distinguished clothes mended ; one hatter who renovated his distinguished bell-topper ; one chemist where he bought his antibilious pills; one church where he didn’t say his distinguished piayers; one tobacco shop where he filled his distinguished pipe; one bottle of “pure juice of the grape” that he drank all to himself, thus accounting for his general fogginess; one linen-draper selling off at an alarming sacrifice ; one steeple, one lamp post, one drunkard, one lunatic, one insolvent, one share-jobber, one paving-stone, one scoundrel, one convicted criminal, and ono north wind. So much for Anthony—yes, so much for Trollope, and the juice of fiction.