AUSTRALIAN PATRIOTISM.
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.