SIR CHARLES DUFFY ON VICTORIA.

Evening Star, Issue 4265, 27 October 1876, Page 4

SIR CHARLES DUFFY ON VICTORIA.

To the Editor. Sir, —The three morning papers have been singing with most wonderful unanimity a chorus in praise of Sir Charles Duffy’s article, “ Port Phillip, a Preliminary Chapter in the Political .History or Victoria.’' On the whole it ia fairly written—for a fifth or sixth-rate journal. "Rut if such writing as some of it is were to appear' in”,the,leading columns of the ‘ Arcus ’ there would be a great disturbance in the editorial sanctum at three o’clock that afternoon. A-*. for anything in the United Kingdom that pretended ho the dignity of a “ Review,” or even monthly magazine, admitting such composition, 1 can scarcely entertain tho notion. Having said so much I am in some sort bound to justify ray opinion. Let me do so, and ii any reader does not care about morsels of this kind let him pass to the next column. The second sentence of Sir Charles’s article begins “ There are citizens who remembei that pre-bistoric period.” Allowing that tin “ pre-bistoric pm .d ” is a metaphorical expression it may not be inapt, butitisevr tainly a solecism to say t;,at living people remember ii. We read in the next line ot “Captain Lonsdaie, police nnc a nte from Sydney.” This rather unusual use of tin preposition is a ‘‘pregnant construction,’ and is no doubt intended to rave many words, but compression,, whore it .sacrifices ' neropic tv fcy and is carried beyond even the anal eob-s of usual expression;., is .lurch- not a grace of cicd/on, and is uui of place at the very coKUn.ir.ucemerit of an article, before tho unexpressed ideas have beer; brought to the reader's mind. This gentleman from Sydney possessed “in rudimentary developmentcertain powers. I always thought that a “ rudimentary ” organ or power (if in biology, from which science tho allusion ia taken, the wordy be ’’applicable' to" a .power) wa\s an organ or power not developed, and thavt an organ been jde veloped ceased ipso facto to be rudimentary. It seems, hovrever, either that a police magistrate posi jesses an official capacity to be in two incoroipatible states at the same time or that a nevr made Irish knight considers himself superior to the laws of English composition. Passing over some rather schoolboy allusions to the founders of Rome, wo turn over the leaf and find the following statements : “Towards the close of the last century . . . T1 1 .1 _ .1 T1 V I 1 i < i

England and France despatched rival expeditions to the Pacific in search of unknown or unexplored lands. The English expedition was a notable success. Captain Cook discovered the eastern coast of Austaliaand a footnote adds —“The continent of Australia was discovered by Captain Cook in 1770." f i he account is correct as to the date and as to the fact of Cook’s exploring in New South Wales, but, not to dwell on that most wearisome and fruitless topic—priority of discovery, there is a rather serious omission. The reader would naturally .gather that these expeditions sprang from the spirit of maritime adventure” which iintroduces the paragraph, and that their sole object was geographical, whereas this was quite a secondary consideration, at any rate with the Englishmen, whose great aim was to determine the solar parallax by observing the transit of Venus on the 3rd of June, 1769, at Tahiti. Possibly cur author might plead that, as the matter was not essential to his subject, strict attention to its details vras not requisite. Whereto the obvious x.ojoinder is - then why introduce it ? Leave like, the reasons for despatching the expedition, but if you state them, do so correctly. It is by slipshod writing of this sort that facts are distorted, and multitudes of people misled who take a “review” axnkicle for something truer than Gospel, and a knight who puts “M.P.” after .his name for something superior to a seer. Inaccuracies of expression abound, e.g. “a scion of the gnberuatonalhonse,” asthongh governorships were hereditaiy ; “the news got pnmted,” “thePressgotestablished.” But, as if t<o redeem by an over-refinement elsewhere these errors in certain phrases, we have the honuely “wattle and dab” transmogrified into “wattle and daub.” One feels curious to know the exact force that inheres in such an axpres-ion as “ the flame was too violent to subside with a temporary success, ” W nves subs;de I know; flames usually die out or die away or cease to burn ; but 'how. anythin', can be said to subside with a temporary sue* cess is not qu,te clear. Victoria is slid i o be m the same latitude as the warmer countries of Southern Europe. Geographers please take note hereof and correct (’) vour previous impression that the respective latitudes were only “similar” and not “tbosame ” The conjunction “and” sometimes couples clauses totally disconnected in sense, and in several places is used in direct violation of rules that allow no exception. Here and there are frightful jingles tolerable to no ear with a sense of music, as (exuno dme plures) I had tae satisfaction—a generation after separation. O “shun”—thou mi'htv monster! <3 j Last, but 'not least, of his faults, Sir Charles presents some old Colonists to us nmler names that they would have denied, in .V,"' peeves appears as Dr “Greaves” not once » whi cb might be a parW m two p aces far apart. And surely some str-moe mtd bitween Mr E M. Curr, the Resent inspector of Aeep and the Mr Kerr, of history f JWboorno, October u, SCEDIiTOR '