Читать книгу Head-Waters of Canadian Literature - Archibald McKellar MacMechan - Страница 6

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ike 'home' and 'gentleman,' 'literature' is a word not to be lightly used, nor to be applied without nice discrimination. Unconscious of their impiety, traders dare to call their advertising pamphlets; politicians, their screaming campaign handbills; and professors, their stupefying endless lists of books and articles by this high and sacred name. The distinction drawn by De Quincey still holds good. All books may be divided into the 'literature of knowledge' and 'the literature of power.' Since the world began, it has been granted to some few scores or hundreds of men to put together words that live; that may justly be called literature, the literature of power. Of it, the two chief ingredients are imagination and harmony. The literature of power is creative; and, by universal consent, is held to be poetry in all its branches. When the literature of a nation is mentioned, the first names that come to mind are the names of great poets: Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe. These are the glories of the nations which brought them forth.

Whether or not Canada has produced a literature in this sense is a question which has been debated long and hotly. Some say 'No!' with emphasis, and demand a Canadian Dickens, a Canadian Tennyson. Others say 'Yes,' and point to the hundreds of books which have been printed in the country since Canada was a name on the map of the world. That the question has been raised at all is a sign that the young nation has a soul, which is striving to be articulate. It is a most important question and it must receive a definite answer.

Canadians are in truth a prosaic people. A candid historian of the American Revolution terms them a 'tamer, less inventive people' who have never shown power of initiative like the colonists who made the United States. An Australian observer, passing through, notes that Canadians are sprung from the peasant class of Britain. There is truth in both assertions. As a race, Canadians have always been dazzled by the rapid growth of material prosperity in the Great Republic, and have been the sincere imitators of its political, educational and religious institutions. This is the result of the national youth and diffidence. It is also true that Canadians generally are descended from the working populations of the Old World, rather than from the gentry, though gentle blood is to be found in the land. They are, in the main, a forest-felling, railway-building, plowing, sowing, reaping, butter-and-cheese making people, busied with mines and fisheries and factories, intent on making their share of the world a place of human habitation. They are a law-abiding, church-going, school-attending, debt-paying people who, after a long hard struggle with material conditions, are beginning to prosper. As befits its peasant origins, the Dominion is half a continent staked out for a new experiment in Democracy. For a long time, it seemed as if the experiment were doomed to fail; but the earlier difficulties have been overcome and Canada is becoming a nation.

On the surface though Canada be prosaic and commonplace, there is deep down in the nation's heart a capacity for the ideal. It was for an ideal that Canada poured out blood and treasure like water in the Great War. When Canadians figure their country to themselves, they call up no cypher of population, no symbol of territory, no statistic of trade, but the image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her face. When they apply for admission to the great family of nations, they do not present as credentials their wealth, their cities, their harvests of a thousand million bushels, but a few printed books, some songs, a tale or two. They say to the world in effect: 'We are a people, not because we have cleared the land, built roads and cities, thriven in trade; but because we have a voice. These printed pages tell how we think and feel, what we remember and what we desire. These dead leaves speak for the masses of us who otherwise were dumb.'

Literature, then, is the voice of a people. Through its literature, the life, the soul of a people may be known. When that literature manifests the strange quality of moving the imagination to body forth the forms of things unknown and of stirring the human heart by which we live, then it deserves to be called the literature of power. And though it is vain to look for a Canadian Dickens, a Canadian Tennyson, work of this rare kind has been written in Canada, of Canada, by birthright Canadians. It is a question of degree, not of kind.

This may be merely a personal and private view of Canadian literature; but even if Canada be denied a literature, she must be credited with a certain amount of literary activity. That activity has been conditioned by history and geography and is plainly manifest as five separate movements identified with different parts of the country and with different periods of its growth. The first, in order of time, centres at Halifax, and the second at Quebec. The third movement has its home in Ontario; the fourth is strictly local and confined to Montreal. The fifth movement has no bounds but the frontiers of the Dominion. To trace the course of these movements is the purpose of this book.

The primacy of Nova Scotia is due to the accident of early settlement. Its new capital, Halifax, a fiat city, was built in a lull between two wars, to counterpoise Louisbourg, the French stronghold in the island of Cape Breton; and its creation was a most advantageous move in the secular game of war between France and England. From its foundation in the mid-eighteenth century, Halifax has been a city acquainted with books and imbued with literary taste. When New France was in its last agonies under its Bigots and Vaudreuils, or drained, after the Cession but for its clergy, of its educated class, and when the rest of the present Dominion was wilderness or virgin forest, Halifax had its books and book sellers, its book-binders and even its book auctions, its own newspapers and its own magazines. Thus Nova Scotia holds the position of primacy in the intellectual development of Canada.

It is now generally admitted by American historians that the cruel expulsion of the Loyalists from the United States after the Revolution, deprived the new country of the educated and cultured class. Confirmation of this view is found in the history of the Mayflower Province. It is precisely during the period of Loyalist immigration into Nova Scotia that the first provincial magazine flourished. In 1783, Governor Parr wrote that there were 25,000 Loyalists in his government. Of themselves they were able to found the city of Shelburne and the city of St. John, soon destined to be the capital of a new province created by fission from Nova Scotia. In July, 1789, the year of the Rights of Man, there appeared in Halifax the first number of The Nova Scotia Magazine and Comprehensive Review of Literature, Politics and News. This was a monthly magazine of eighty pages, and double columns, well printed, if with rather small type. The editor was a Loyalist who had been professor of classics in King's College, at New York; the printer was a Loyalist from Boston, young John Howe, who was to beget a famous son. The eighteenth century was the age of classical education, and the title is decorated with two learned mottoes. The first, Orientia tempora notis Instruit exemplis, declares the editor's purpose, while the second, Scribentem juvat ipse favor, minuitque laborem, hints delicately at consideration and support. The magazine is necessarily a compilation, as editorial preface declares; but, even so, it leaves no doubt as to the tastes of the constituency for which it caters. Literature comes first in the sub-title and first in fact. The opening article is historical, retrospective and appeals to a local patriotism, which was even then evidently strong. It is a reprint of the life of Sir William Alexander, court favorite of James I, the original grantee of Nova Scotia, taken entire from the Biographia Britannica.[1] The preface is confident that 'Everything that is connected with the history of this Province must be interesting to the people who inhabit it.' One feature is a long list of new books classified according to subject, and taken with due acknowledgment from The Analytical Review. There are extracts from du Paty and from Mr. Gibbon's new history of the Roman Empire; Collins' Ode on Highland Superstitions is printed in full. Much space is given to the debates in the British House of Commons. There are echoes of notable happenings in France and England; the appeal of Philippe Egalité to representatives in his bailiwicks finds a place beside the protest of Warren Hastings. Ten pages are devoted to foreign, and perhaps, a column and a half to local, news. The list of subscribers appears in the first number and contains names of families which have been prominent in the life of the city from that day to this. In a note to the second volume, the editor expresses the hope that the magazine 'may long continue an evidence of the literary taste of the Province, and a record of its prosperity and happiness.' The evidence of taste is beyond dispute; but the pious wish for length of days was not granted. The Nova Scotia Magazine came to an end in 1791, when the Loyalist population ebbed.

For nearly a century, Nova Scotia had a new magazine for almost every fresh decade. They were all ambitious and all short lived. Two call for special remark.

The Acadian Magazine or Literary Mirror, Consisting of Original and Selected matter on Literary and Other Subjects, appeared in 1826. This was a large double-column monthly, apparently modelled on Blackwood's and boldly venturing upon illustrations. 'Embellishments' appear to lighten the letter-press, views of beautiful Windsor and the stately Province House, portraits of Canning and the Duke of York. Local patriotism has grown apace. This is no longer a compilation, but a magazine in the modern sense. Contributors from all parts of the province and beyond it send articles, sketches, letters, poems, signed generally with pseudonyms or initials. A mathematical genius submits a method of squaring the circle, with a convincing diagram, and a lively discussion follows, Pictou and Musquodoboit joining merrily in the fray. Between 1789 and 1826, when the Acadian began its all too brief career, a new generation had grown up, proud of their province and the things that were theirs by right of birth. In the first volume, there is a series of articles called 'Characteristics of Nova Scotia,' with Scott's proud line for motto:

This is my own, my native land.

The mental attitude dictating the articles may be further inferred from a single sentence: 'We . . . . without assumed ostentation or empty arrogance must declare that Nova Scotia possesses many legitimate sources of pride.' The writer mentions with approval two poems which seem to herald a nativist literary movement. The first is The Rising Village, written by Oliver Goldsmith, grand-nephew of his great name-sake. It tells how a local Edwin jilted his Angelina, and sketches the growth of a backwoods settlement. The second, Melville Island was the first attempt of Joseph Howe to express his love for the natural beauty of his province, in this case for the winding fiord called the North West Arm, on the shores of which he was born. The Acadian was avowedly 'literary,' its title says so twice over, and soon dropped the local news, because it was all anticipated by the regular journals. It prints such rarities as a translation of one of Michael Angelo's madrigals, evidently to gratify the taste of such readers as founded the old Halifax Library and bought first editions of Imaginary Conversations to put in it.

To The Acadian succeeded The Halifax Monthly Magazine (1830-1832), an interesting and lively periodical, invaluable as an index to the literary preferences of by-gone Haligonians. The appeal is exclusively to the educated and the refined. Choice bits from Praed, Scott, Macaulay, D'Israeli (the elder) are reprinted. Notice is taken of the great lights going out, Lacon Colton, Bentham, Cuvier, Goethe. The editor has an eye for local talent; he reviews Cooney's History of New Brunswick, and criticises at length the annual exhibition of the printing club. Great questions are discussed, such as a railway to connect the various colonies of British North America.

Between 1789 and 1873 ten separate magazines ran their course in Nova Scotia. That they failed is regrettable; but they served one purpose, they proved the fact of local interest in literature, of an ever growing local patriotism, an ever broadening culture. They tell of an atmosphere in which letters would flourish.

The first book printed in Nova Scotia was a volume of provincial laws compiled by John Duport, Esq., J.P., and printed by Robert Fletcher in 1766; but Statutes At Large belongs to Elia's catalogue of books that are no books. The first original work which merits recognition in the 'literature of knowledge' is Haliburton's Nova Scotia, which will be discussed in its proper place with the rest of that author's output. Its significance is not slight. As far back as 1789, the editor of the first provincial magazine expressed the desire for a 'connected history of the province' and alluded to a 'hand which is amply capable of such an undertaking,' and was at that time actually engaged upon such a work. The allusion is undoubtedly to the Reverend Andrew Brown, pastor of historic St. Matthews and afterwards professor of Philosophy in Edinburgh University. He collected the materials for an extensive work but his manuscript, after its strange rescue from a destructive grocer, lies still unpublished in the British Museum. Historical writing proceeds from local, provincial, or national self-consciousness and pride. That a 'connected history' of Nova Scotia should have been demanded and projected so early and that it should have taken such an ambitious form as Haliburton's is additional proof of the rapid growth of a vigorous local patriotism. His work is also historically important as being the first account of any Canadian province on anything like the same scale. There again Nova Scotia holds the primacy over her sister provinces. The chief significance of Haliburton, however, is that he told the tale of the Acadians which found its sacer vates in Longfellow; and Evangeline made Nova Scotia classic ground.

Since Haliburton, the study of local history has flourished greatly. Beamish Murdoch digested the available MSS and printed materials into three portly, indispensable volumes of annals. Campbell and Hannay drew their connected histories from this source. When Howe came to power, he had a Record Commission appointed to gather up the provincial muniments, and secured a most suitable man for the task, Thomas Beamish Akins, an enthusiast in his subject, and a charming gentleman of the old school possessed of private means. He collected, arranged, classified, indexed and catalogued the divers records of the province, supplementing the original documents at hand with transcripts of others in London and Paris. From these he drew his Nova Scotia Archives published in 1869, which Parkman used with due acknowledgments for his monumental work. The Nova Scotia Historical Society, founded in 1878, has issued some twenty volumes of its Collections. Thanks to Dr. Akins, every county has its history, and almost every one its printed history. Yarmouth has two histories. Patterson's history of Pictou county, Crowell's monograph on Barrington township and the Calnek-Savary history of Annapolis contain much valuable information. The various churches, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, have each their voluminous and painful chronicler. The colleges; Acadia, Dalhousie, King's, have their historians. Nor has biography, the history of individuals, been neglected. Hill wrote the life of Sir Brenton Halliburton, and Patterson, the life of MacGregor, the 'Seceder' missionary to Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century. MacGregor was one of the fathers of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and his name is still a household word in the field of his apostolic labors. One grandson became lieutenant-governor of the province, and another, after a distinguished career at Dalhousie, filled the chair of Physics at Edinburgh University. Patterson also wrote memoirs of the missionaries Johnson and Matheson and of the martyred Gordons, who laid down their lives for the Faith in the far-off islands of the sea. Of Howe, the statesman, there are four separate 'lives,' Fenerty's interesting sketch, Longley's fuller account as a 'maker of Canada,' Principal Grant's sympathetic appreciation and his son, Professor W. L. Grant's brief but authoritative 'Chronicle,' The Tribune of Nova Scotia. Howe's Letters and Speeches are at once an autobiography and an authority of prime importance for the history of the province in a most critical stage. Richey's life of the pioneer of Methodism in Nova Scotia, 'Bishop' Black, one of Wesley's trusted lieutenants, is full of interest. The Journal of Alleyne, the fervid New Light evangelist is a contribution to the literature of religious experience and was used by Professor William James in his Gifford Lectures.

Nova Scotia has a history; Nova Scotians write history, and some of them have made history.

The science of nature has not been neglected. Nova Scotians, being ship-builders and sailors, have made contributions to the general knowledge of the world. In the forties, Admiral Sir Edward Belcher, R.N., grandson of the first Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, published his narrative of H.M.S. Sulphur's voyage round the world in 1836-42. The most important book of Canadian travel, Ocean to Ocean was written by George Munro Grant, while minister of historic St. Matthew's in Halifax. He was the scribe of Sir Sanford Fleming's party which crossed the western wilderness of Canada in 1872, and revealed to Canadians the undeveloped riches of their new domain. Nova Scotia is one great plum-pudding of ores and minerals which were early studied in a scientific way. The Acadian Geology of Sir William Dawson is a classic in its department, and is only one of a score of similar contributions to an exact knowledge of Nature's part in making Nova Scotia. Long before Dawson's day, in 1836, Abraham Gesner, a Granville man, had written an able geology of the province, when the very science was in its infancy. Gesner is the discoverer of coal oil and of Albertite. The dons of the various little colleges have to their credit various learned works in botany, metaphysics, mathematics, criticism, and so on, biblia a-biblia, unread except by students. MacGregor of Dalhousie before his promotion to Edinburgh produced some fifty scientific papers which secured his admission to the Royal Society. The local scientific movement has drawn to a head, like the historical movement, in an organization, the Nova Scotia Institute of Science, founded in 1862, which has its own library and its own series of publications. Much literary activity must be dismissed in a single sentence such as volumes of religious controversy, of sermons, of agricultural lore, educational treatises, pamphlets without end, on all subjects.

Journalism is a subject by itself. The first newspaper published in what is now the Dominion of Canada was The Halifax Gazette. The first number issued on March 23, 1752, from a little office in Grafton Street, which is marked in one of Short's engravings. The activity of Howe as a journalist in The Novascotian set a standard for Canada not yet surpassed. One paper, The Acadian Recorder, has an uninterrupted life of more than a hundred years, mainly under the management of one family.

Of minor, not to say minim poets, there is no dearth. Almost every generation of Haligonians has had its singers, or satirists, or occasional versers. From the first, there were those who strung Popian couplets in the newspapers. They are always faint echoes of the prevailing literary fashions: Pope, Scott, Byron, Moore, Mrs. Hemans. There is also the workingman poet, a Scot, of course, who tries to walk in the footsteps of Robert Burns. All this work tells the same tale as the magazines, the tale of strong local feeling. A rather stout anthology could be compiled of verse in praise of the provincial floral emblem, the beautiful trailing arbutus (epigæa repens), or Mayflower, now happily under the aegis of the law. Nova Scotian verse has generally two leading motives, edification and the celebration of places. A critic might think it impossible to poetise on such harsh names as Stewiacke or Musquodoboit, but only if he had been so unhappy as never to have seen the happy valleys watered by those enchanted streams. New Brunswick can boast of Roberts and Bliss Carman, but some of their best work draws its color and life breath from the landscapes of Nova Scotia. They are well fitted to set poets rhyming, being themselves poems. Roberts' Ave, in the judgment of some, his finest poem, is rich in this special and peculiar charm, while Carman's Low Tide on Grand Pré is even fuller of Acadia's gramarye. Rand's At Minas Basin and Herbin's The Marshlands are distinguished by sincerity of feeling and often deft interpretation of a scenery to be found nowhere else in the world. Mrs. Lawson's Frankincense and Myrrh and Hamilton's Feast of Ste. Anne deserve mention. Thistledown, a posthumous volume of prose and verse by A. R. Garvie, shows unusual cultivation, with his versions of Horace and Heine and appreciation of Holman Hunt, when that great artist's name was hardly known in England. Nova Scotia has also contributed to the hymnology of the Christian church. We love the place, O God, is taken from a Christian Year by the Rev. W. Bullock published in Halifax in 1854; and Dr. Robert Murray is author of From Ocean unto Ocean, with its reminiscence of the title of Grant's travels. The Reverend Silas Rand, the missionary of the Micmacs and the translator of the Bible into their tongue, published a volume of Latin hymns.

But Nova Scotia boasts more famous names than these. Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) was born in Windsor and educated at King's College, the oldest university in the British Dominions overseas. Williams of Kars, Inglis of Lucknow and he are the most distinguished sons of that venerable institution. He practised law in Annapolis Royal and afterwards in Halifax, where he was made a judge. He died a member of the British House of Commons and a D.C.L. of Oxford. His literary career began with the history of the province already mentioned, but his first success was his Recollections of Nova Scotia which ran in Howe's newspaper from September 1835 until February 1836. The same year, 1836, appeared in Halifax a small, neat volume entitled The Clockmaker or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville. This is the editio princeps and bears the imprint of Joseph Howe. The next year these papers in an obscure, provincial journal were published in London as The Clockmaker and Sam Slick, the smart Yankee who wins his way by 'soft sawder' and his knowledge of 'human natur' became a figure in literature. His creator, the colonial judge, became famous. Justin McCarthy tells that the sayings of Sam Slick[2] were once as well known as the sayings of Sam Weller. Professor Ray Palmer Baker has come upon two hundred editions of Haliburton's works.

These sketches of life in Nova Scotia were not the first of their kind. McCulloch, the first Principal of Dalhousie, had contributed The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure to The Acadian Recorder in 1823; but the judge had a pungent humor, a command of dialect, and a story-telling gift the divine could not approach. He was a shrewd observer. A Halifax gentleman travelling with him in the Windsor stage-coach has told how a fellow passenger, a buxom country-woman, was discoursing about a temperance lecturer who was to speak at a given time and place; she said 'sugar off.' From his corner in the coach, Haliburton eyed her, took out his notebook and jotted down the racy phrase. The anecdote illustrates Haliburton's method and goes far to explain the popularity of his first and most famous work. Being based on first-hand observation of actual life in a British province, his 'Recollections' had a reality, a salt and savor never attained by any of his other works. Local critics sometimes try to belittle Haliburton's achievement by saying that he collected stories and did not invent them. If this be true, it only shows that like Molière he took his good things where he found them.

In creating Sam Slick, Haliburton uncovered the rich mine of American humor. The Clockmaker is the same kind of cute Yankee as the real estate agent in Martin Chuzzlewit. Lots in Eden, shoepeg oats, clocks in Nova Scotia, all existed like the famous razors, to sell. Caveat emptor! Smartness, bragging, exaggeration, dialect are features of Sam Slick. His sayings have wide currency. Many are embalmed in Bartlett as 'Americanisms;' and they were collected in a British province by a lawyer of Scottish descent.

Two other series of The Clockmaker sketches followed the original success. They are usually all combined in one volume. In The Attaché Haliburton attempted to do for England what Dickens had done for the United States in American Notes. Sam Slick visits England with satirical intent, having as much respect for the effete institutions of the old country as Jefferson Brick. He had already found many faults and failings among the Bluenoses to castigate and hold up to ridicule. In contrast to the Americans, they were lazy, lacking in enterprise and besotted with politics. The English also might naturally be expected to fall short of Sam Slick's exalted standards.

It was not as a satirist, however, that Haliburton first came before the public but as a serious historian. In 1829 there was published at Halifax An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, in Two Volumes, Illustrated by a Map of the Province, and Several Engravings. By Thomas C. Haliburton Esq., Barrister-at-Law and member of the House of Assembly of Nova Scotia. It is a handsome work of more than 800 pages with good paper and type, and, except for the proof-reading, well printed. The motive is patriotic. On the title-page appears again Scott's ringing line:

This is my own, my native land.

For this patriotic work, Haliburton received the rare honor of the Assembly's formal thanks and a grant of £500, but Howe, the publisher, was almost ruined by it.

Haliburton's Nova Scotia, as it is commonly called, is a curious production. Perhaps the most curious feature is the author's own declaration revealing his naïve conception of history, as dealing only with matters remote and romantic. For him the history of the province ends with the Peace of Paris in 1763. 'The uniform tranquility and repose which Nova Scotia has since enjoyed, affords us no material for an historical narrative,' he writes as a sort of colophon, and then adds inconsistently 'A Chronological Table of events connected with and illustrative of the History of Nova Scotia,' from 1763 to 1828, which is as artless as the annals of a medieval chronicler.

When he wrote, his only models were the historians of the eighteenth century. His account of the Seven Years' War is transferred bodily from Smollett. On account of his father's illness, he was unable to read the proof: hence there are many misprints in the first volume. The relation of the second volume to the anonymous pamphlet, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, has been long in doubt. The similarity of title is noteworthy. Some hold that the pamphlet was Haliburton's ballon d'essai; others that it was the work of Walter Bromley, ex-paymaster of the 23rd Foot. But even a reading of the preface should settle the question. There the anonymous author refers to himself as having been fifteen years in the country and having made several journeys into the interior. In Justin Winsor's Critical History, Haliburton's work is discredited, but it contains a mass of data not readily accessible elsewhere.

Still, Haliburton's Nova Scotia deserves its fame. It is the first history of a Canadian province; it is planned on an ambitious scale; and it is an eloquent witness to the strength of provincial patriotism at that early period. But its most remarkable feature is that for the first time, it told the world the story of the Expulsion of the Acadians. Inaccurate and generously ex parte as his statements are, they had a great influence. They inspired Catherine Williams' novel The Neutral French, which in turn was used by Longfellow in the composition of Evangeline. It was through an aunt of Haliburton's that the tale of the separated lovers, the idée mère of the famous poem, came to Longfellow's knowledge. His criticism of contemporary Canadian politics, Bubbles of Canada, shows him to be a crusted colonial Tory, who reverted naturally and easily to life in England. With Papineau and Mackenzie, and even with the moderate Reformers he had no sympathy whatever. He was capable of believing that anarchy in the United States was due to the lack of a state church. The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony, has a greater value for Canadians than Sam Slick; for it presents the manners and conditions of a Canadian province in its pioneer stage. It stands head and shoulders above the few other books which picture the origins of our people. Haliburton is fond of Rabelais' easy chair; and he has some fine pages of description, such as the Duke of Kent's Lodge and the desolation of Shelburne. His characteristic humor and satire abound in his sketches of Halifax society, the Governor and his little court, the climbers and the snobs.

The effigy of Joseph Howe stands in bronze on the sunny side of the Province House, where he planted the oak on the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth. The inscription on the base styles him 'Poet,' conferring a patent of nobility which some might be disposed to question. Without dispute, however, he had the poet's temperament. Proof of this in plenty will be found in his Poems and Essays published at Montreal in 1874. There you have the best of Howe; you see his heart laid bare; you learn to know the great thoughts in whose society the man lived. The themes of his verse are the loveliness of his native province, loyalty to it and to the mother land, the primal sympathies of the home. Whatever fault the critic may find with its form, or its imitative or derivative character, the feeling it expresses is always right and sincere. His prose is much stronger. Speeches do not, as a rule, read well; but these are solid and bear close scrutiny. The Shakespeare address is inspiring and ends with a fine tribute to Queen Victoria. That on 'Eloquence' reveals the open secrets of his own success as a speaker,—simplicity, earnestness, character. The speech at the great family gathering of the Howes is a broad-minded, manly eirenicon. A British subject, he addresses an American audience at a time when their country was exacerbated with his country. He speaks wisely, nobly, with true tact, without giving cause of offence, and yet without lowering his flag for a moment. He has sentences like this: 'A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead, repairs its great public structures and fosters national pride and love of country by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past.' Howe's renown as an orator and as a constructive statesman should not obscure his services to the cause of Canadian letters. It seems impossible that he should have had no part, in the two Halifax magazines which flourished in his youth. Howe's Letters to Lord John Russell reveal him as a deep political thinker, teaching a British statesman the true principles of democracy.

James De Mille (his own modification of the Dutch patronymic Demill) came of Loyalist blood on both sides of the house, and was born in the Loyalist city of St. John; but his life-work was done in Nova Scotia. From 1861 until 1864 he was Professor of Classics at Acadia. Migrating to Dalhousie in the latter year, he became Professor of Rhetoric and History until his death in 1880. He was only forty-seven years of age, but he had more than a score of books to his credit, for he wielded a fluent pen. His first publication was a story of the early Christians, called The Martyrs of the Catacombs (1865) followed in 1867 by Helena's Household, a longer and better tale on the same theme. Like Haliburton's, his first success was humorous, and dealt with American character. This was The Dodge Club which appeared as a serial in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1868. It may have been suggested by his own tour in Europe in 1850-51 with his elder brother. Here he struck the vein of comic travels from the irreverent American point of view, which Mark Twain worked to such profit in the contemporaneous Innocents Abroad. Six of De Mille's novels were published by Harper's, one of which, The American Baron, was translated into French by Louis Ulbach and went through several editions in that form. Appleton's published An Open Question, and The Lady of the Ice, which seems to have been adapted for the stage. He also wrote nine books for boys, the B. O. W. C. series. They are based in part on his schoolboy experiences at Horton and they are the only books of his which owe anything to the province of Nova Scotia.

No one could think more meanly of his books than their author; he called them his 'trash,' his 'pot-boilers.' They are indeed facile imitations of the prevailing literary fashions; but criticism may go too far in condemnation, and, through ignorance or malice, some of De Mille's critics have certainly gone too far. Only a gentleman and a scholar possessing something like genius could have written these light, amusing novels. There is fun, brisk succession of incident, and capital situations in these despised 'pot-boilers.' Even in the lurid Cord and Creese, which has enthralled many a boy, the description of the Greek play, of Langhetti's music, and the scene of the lovers in the church show what he was capable of. Among the books from his library presented by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church, a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. His serious work was an elaborate 'Rhetoric,' which is perhaps the best of its old-fashioned kind, and a long religious poem, Behind the Veil, published since his death. De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.

The literary impulse which was once so strong in Nova Scotia and produced the first literary movement in Canada is by no means spent; but those who feel it belong to a more modern period and were subject to other than local influences. A modern instance of this impulse still at work is in The Book of the High Romance, by Michael Williams, a Haligonian born and bred. It is an Odyssey of the soul in search of faith, and the quest ends in the Roman communion. The first section sketches his childhood and youth in Halifax; and it contains most beautiful vignettes of life in the old garrison town and sea-port.