traducements, whether true or otherwise, and after a long, practical,
and singularly useful career, died in the full regard of his adopted
country. The unanimity of dislike and moral depreciation with which he
was regarded by his Tasmanian fellows was not indeed without a certain
share of reason or excuse. That he was the son of a convict ought not,
of course, to prejudice him in these Christian days, when the sins of
the fathers are not to be visited upon the sons even to the first
generation. His father arrived with Collins's prisoner party, and the
boy, John Pascoe, then eleven years old, was sent with his parent--for
not seldom were wives or children thus sent with the convicts, to
ameliorate by such a touch of nature the hard features of a society of
adult vice, much as Hogarth, in some of his masterpieces of the human
woes or vices of his time, gives, in striking contrast, a foreground of
maternal affection, or of children at play in the artless innocence of
their looks and ways.

But he was probably neither a pretty nor an interesting boy; for as a
man he was of the very plainest, with a short figure, always negligently
"put on," a rough, mannerless way, and a voice husky and hoarse,
although redeemed at times into an approach to commanding an audience,
when he was strongly stirred in some exciting cause. Some people have no
patience to subdue natural antipathies in such cases, and these people
would, as well-known scripture (with some transposition of the idea)
tells us, be apt to be most plentiful "in his own country." But, again,
Fawkner was himself a convict. Yes, but for what? Certainly if a man so
notorious in after life had committed any very disparaging crime it must
have been as notorious as his name. But I never heard anything
distinctive beyond that he had, for something or other, passed under the
Caudine Forks of the Van Diemen's Land Criminal Courts. Inevitably his
early upbringing was in low associations, where, probably, ties of