New South Wales, and that now, in his seventy-fourth year, he again grasps in his capable hands the helm of public affairs in that great dependency.
Let us turn now to the old files of the Sydney newspaper, and see what picture this even then distinguished Australian formed of the England of twenty-five years ago, when Lord Palmerston, in his eightieth year, was jauntily governing the country, with Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Disraeli as leader of the Opposition; when the Prince Consort's sudden death left the Queen a bereaved woman, and removed from the conduct of England's complex affairs a most clear, searching, and unbiassed intellect; when the grand vitality of Lord Brougham was fast flickering out like a spent flame, while Bright and Cobden were in the zenith of their political activity; when Carlyle and Tennyson were on the rising tide of literary pre-eminence—and when our kinsmen of America were rent asunder by the most Titanic Civil War in the annals of mankind.
The English reader will be good enough to bear in mind that the mission of Messrs. Parkes and
