COLONIAL ART.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2183, 23 February 1881, Page 3

COLONIAL ART.

It is (say* the London correspondent of the “ New Zealand Herald”) a fact in connection with the colonies that their devotion to trade, and trade almost exclusively, as it seems to observers in England, repels every cultivated man from studying their life and politics. There is so much to learn about old civilizations like France, Germany, Italy, Spain, they will say, that the life of the colonial farmers and merchants, unrelieved as it is by art or literature of any original and spontaneous growth, is dull and uninteresting. Under this idea many of the literary classes turn away from thoughts of the colonies altogether, and now they will acquiesce in the indifferentism of such men as Sir Charles Dilke, when it is asserted that the colonies ought to be standing on their own legs. In one of his recent speeches Mr Grant Duff made an allusion that deserves to be quoted in the light of that feeling I refer to—“ After all everything in these countries is, as compared with the Old World, merely of yesterday, The place where the great Melbourne Exhibition now stands was a pathless wilderness when some whom I am now addressing had already reached manhood. Is it strange that they should not yet have developed those higher literary and artistic gifts which make the poetry of national life, and live while all else is forgotten; but there is already promise even of these. Certainly the most remarkable new lines I have come across for some time were some, by whom, I know not, which were cut out of an Australian paper by a friend of mine. ‘ Who can the author of this bo ?’ said a foreign friend of mine, as I wos passing across the Continent on my way to India, putting into my hands a letter of quite extraordinary beauty. * I have not the faintest conception,’ I said, * but I daresay I can find out.’ I did find out in a few months, and the writer was the daughter of a tradesman inaNewZealand provincial town.” After an announcement of that sort, from one highly placed in the Government, it is needless to say that a volume will be expected in due course from "the daughter of a tradesman.”