The "Daily News" of June 15, reviews a new work published in England under the title of "Diary of a Working Clergyman in Australia and Tasmania, Kept During the Years 1850 - 1853, including his return to England by Way of Java, Singapore, Ceylon, and Egypt," by the Rev. John Davies Mereweather, B.A., London (Hatchard) and thus introduces an extract from the work. A description of our author's church in Tasmania, and of his introduction to some of his parishioners, is a proof that our emigrants carry out civilisation and refinement with them to the antipodes:

"October 15 - Rode out to Patterson's Plains, the scene of my chaplaincy. Patterson's Plains is the name given to a fertile valley running between two ridges of rather lofty hills, watered by a limpid stream called the Esk. About five miles from Launceston, at the lofty side of the road, on a slight declivity, where the hill-side mellows into the plain, stands a pretty little church, called St. Peter's. It will hold a hundred and twenty people, and has a north aisle, a porch, and a vestry. It has also a bell turret; its lateral windows are intended to be in the style of early English. At the east end there is a very good triple lancet window. It has, too small, a reading-desk and, too large, a pulpit. The view from the churchyard, of the mountain and mountain-forest, of smiling valley and sparkling stream, of bright villas and of labourers' cottages, is inexpressibly charming. But yet the sad-coloured foliage of the trees detracts very much from all this beauty. My churchyard is full of ingubrious wattle-trees, under which the grass does not grow well, so that the whole area has a spotted appearance."

"In the evening, attended a 'conversazione' held at the house of one of the leading ladies in Launceston. A merchant who was present read a very nice paper on Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," or rather on the dramatist's conception of Cleopatra. When I looked round on the elegantly-furnished room, and the well-dressed people all listening intently to the frequent quotations from one of the finest of the poem-plays of the myriad-minded man, I could hardly believe myself to be in the convict settlement of Van Diemen's Land. Probably the very servants who were bringing in the refreshments, and who were lingering at the door, to catch the last immortal longings of the dying Egyptian beauty, whose 'infinite variety age could not wither, nor custom stale,' were convicts banished for ever from their country for some hideous crime."