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rest are for the most part settlers, settlers’ wives and sons and daughters, miners, shepherds and rabbiters, landholders large and small. It is related of one of them that in a mate’s opinion “he might have been all right at his poetry and stuff, but he was a rotten new chum of a musterer.” Perhaps, if we may compare small things with great, they made the same complaint about Theocritus. A fair proportion of these makers are women, as is only fitting in a land where one of the duties true chivalry owes is thought to be a lessening as far as may be of the disadvantages of sex.

All the verse in this book is written by New Zealanders, but not necessarily all in New Zealand. We have not, however, felt ourselves entitled to use the later verses of Broome or Domett, who themselves acknowledged for this country what we have chosen from them, but who in leaving New Zealand practically shook off their nationality. Again, our order of reference could not be limited to natives without grievous wrong to many “pilgrims” and New Zealanders by adoption. At the same time, “verses by New Zealanders” does not include all verse written in and on New Zealand—“In the Days when the World was Wide,” by Henry Lawson, for instance, is a ballad that belongs entirely to Australia—and this excuses