A young Australian, on being once asked his opinion of a splendid shop
on Ludgate-hill, replied, in a disappointed tone, "It is not equal to
_Big Cooper's_," (a store-shop in Sidney,) while Mrs. Rickards'
_Fashionable Repository_ is believed to be unrivalled, even in
Bond-street. Some of them also contrive to find out that the English
cows give _less_ milk and butter than the Australian, and the
choicest Newmarket racers possess _less_ beauty and swiftness than
_Junius_, _Modus_, _Currency Lass_, and others of Australian turf
pedigree; nay, even a young girl, when asked how she would like to go to
England, replied with great _naiveté_, "I should be afraid to go,
from the _number of thieves_ there," doubtless conceiving England
to be a downright hive of such, that threw off its annual swarms to
people the wilds of this colony. Nay, the very miserable looking trees
that cast their annual coats of bark, and present to the eye of a raw
European the appearance of being actually dead, I have heard praised as
objects of incomparable beauty! and I myself, so powerful is habit,
begin to look upon them pleasurably. Our ideas of beauty are, in truth,
less referrable to a _natural_ than an _artificial_ standard, varying
in every country according to what the eye has been habituated to, and
fashion prescribes.--_Cunningham's Two Years in New South Wales_.
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