Maggs Bros.

Most of these essays were previously published in the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Adams’s friend Frank Harris. Slight wear to head and foot of spine. Adams’s entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography describes a “remarkable series of articles on Australian society” but the essays here are on Tennyson, Shelley, Kipling, Swinburne. He is radical and anti-Imperial - an example is his observation that “The exceeding goodness of God in relation to Englishmen and ‘n******s’ seems always to consist in the opportunity and ability of the former to give the latter ’ hell.’ Never once in his tales does Mr. Kipling appear to be aware that these same miserable aliens may have a point of view of their own … There is always the tacit assumption of the fact that they are made merely to be fought with, conquered, and ruled.”