ear to
year. (G. R. P.)

LITERATURE

1. _English-Canadian Literature_ is marked by the weaknesses as well as
the merits of colonial life. The struggle for existence, the conquering
of the wilderness, has left scant room for broad culture or scholarship,
and the very fact that Canada is a colony, however free to control her
own affairs, has stood in the way of the creation of anything like a
national literature. And yet, while Canada's intellectual product is
essentially an offshoot of the parent literature of England, it is not
entirely devoid of originality, either in manner or matter. There is in
much of it a spirit of freedom and youthful vigour characteristic of the
country. It is marked by the wholesomeness of Canadian life and Canadian
ideals, and the optimism of a land of limitless potentialities.

The first few decades of the period of British rule were lean years
indeed so far as native literature is concerned. This period of unrest
gave birth to little beyond a flood of political pamphlets, of no
present value save as material for the historian. We may perhaps except
the able though thoroughly partisan writings of Sir John Beverley
Robinson and Bishop Strachan on the one side, and Robert Fleming Gourlay
and William Lyon Mackenzie on the other. In the far West, however, a
little group of adventurous fur-traders, of whom Sir Alexander
Mackenzie, David Thompson, Alexander Henry and Daniel Williams Harmon
may be taken as conspicuous types, were unfolding the vast expanse of
the future dominion. They were men of action, not of words, and had no
thought of literary fame, but their absorbingly interesting journals
are none the less an essential part of the literature of the country.

Barring the work of Francis Parkman, who was not a Canadian, no history
of the first rank has yet been written in or of Canada. Canadian
historians have not merely lacked so far the genius for really great
historical work, but they have lacked the point of view; they have stood
too close to their subject to get the true perspective. At the same time
they have brought together invaluable material for the great historian
of the future. Robert Christie's _History of Lower Canada_ (1848-1854)
was the first serious attempt to deal with the period of British rule.
William Kingsford's (1819-1898) ambitious work, in ten volumes, comes
down like Christie's to the Union of 1841, but goes back to the very
beginnings of Canadian history.