English with equal facility, but he prefers to enshrine his best thought in the language which is destined to become the neutral ground of the world. Since 1860 he has written on an average one book a year. He has retired from active life, and enjoys the blessed privilege of only writing when he feels in the mood, and only on his favorite subjects. As I have said elsewhere, Quebec is the most delightful corner on this continent, and of the army of writers who have treated of it none are more familiar with the rich mine of historical and legendary lore to be found in almost every village in this eastern latitude than Mr. Le Moine. His first book, Legendary Lore of the Lower St. Lawrence, at once brought him into prominence, and his Maple Leaves and Quebec Past and Present established his reputation beyond the borders of his native land and over the The last-named work is especially valuable, as the author has preserved within its pages many of the interesting landmarks of Quebec, which recent improvements have ruthlessly demolished. Mr. Le Moine is a most delightful and learned literary cicerone. He has a considerable fund of delicate humor, and his pages teem with happy allusions and illuminating gossip. The traveller who wishes to see Quebec intelligently must read Le Moine, and the sportsman and the antiquarian will find an equal relish in his works. The most notable of his productions, besides those already named, are Explorations in Eastern Latitudes, Picturesque Quebec, and Historical Notes on Quebec and its Environs.

sea.

Mr. William Kirby is one of the tribe of brilliant "one-book men." Many years ago, when he published a novel called Le Chien D'Or, fragrant with the atmosphere of the St. Lawrence, and containing a most vivid portraiture of the life of Quebec, it seemed safe to predict anything for his future. But, beyond a little fugitive verse published in the newspapers, he has since preserved an unbroken silence. Nevertheless, his book seems likely to find its way to the shelves of students of Canadian legendary lore for many generations to come. Messrs. Besant and Rice thought it sufficiently good to appropriate plot,

characters, local coloring, and all, and hash up for English readers, and Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, in a recent visit to Quebec, picked up a copy of the book at an old bookstore, and gave it high praise in Harper's Magazine.

Miss Agnes Maule Machar has been

Nicholas Flood Davin.

blessed with more ample means and leisure than most of the literary guild in Canada possess. She passes the greater part of the year amid the restful and yet invigorating solitudes of the Thousand Islands. Her home is situated on a bold, wooded bluff, overlooking the river and islands through the pine and oak branches, and it is the prodigality of nature with which she is surrounded on all sides that has inspired her best work. She only engages in literary composition in the forenoon, and her strongest and most characteristic poems are sentient with the odors of the woods and the murmurous music of the waters, as she has inhaled them in the early mornings. A great deal of her poetry has appeared in the Century and the New

York Christian Union, and a great deal more has been enshrined in the unfortunate Canadian Monthly, in whose pages so many Canadian writers first found an audience. She intends to make a collection of her poems, and have them published in a more enduring form shortly. A volume of Stories of New France is also going through the press, and she is hard at work upon a novel for publication the present year. In addition to these works she has written a baker's dozen of stories for boys and girls, which have been published by Ogilvie & Co. of Edinburgh.

Mr. J. Hunter Duvar has made some clever translations of the old drinking songs of the Vaux de Vire in Normandy, with running commentaries. He is also the author of The Enamorado and De Roberval

a Canadian drama, which contains many brilliant passages and considerable humor of Elizabethan flavor. He has written, too, some lyrics full of exquisite feeling and alluring imagery.

Dr. W. George Beers is best known to Canadians as the father of lacrosse ; but he has, also, in the limited leisure allowed by a large practice, established a reputation as a charming writer upon outdoor life and pastimes. At seventeen years of age he

was an ardent athlete, and taking lacrosse from the Iroquis Indians, he gave it laws and systematized it into its present shape. He wrote in the Canadian and American press and organized local clubs, until he succeeded in having lacrosse recognized as the Canadian national game. The crack teams that visited Great Britain in 1876 and 1883 were organized and captained by him, and he seized the opportunity presented by the occasion of telling Englishmen something about Canada, in a delightful series of lectures, afterwards published in book form. The success of this work is best appreciated when it is known that there are ten thousand lacrosse players in Canada to-day. Dr. Beers had the honor of being the first Canadian contributor to the old Scribner's and Century magazines, writing historical and descriptive articles full of wit and keen observation. He has since written several books on kindred subjects.

Mr. Gerald E. Hart, although laboring under the disadvantage of coming before the public after Francis Parkman, who in the opinion of some critics has pre-empted the whole of French Canada, has yet succeeded, in his Fall of New France, in presenting this strange and eventful story in a new light, and has won high praise for the manner in which he has executed his task from the most competent critics in England and America. Mr. Hart is a

descendant of one of the staff officers of Amherst's invading army and belongs to one of the oldest English families in Canada. His patriotism and love for all that pertains to the history of our past are naturally inherited. Being actively engaged in commercial life, literature is with him. merely the relaxation of his occasional leisure, but the flattering reception of his first book has tempted him to make another venture. His next book will tell the story of the rebellion in Canada, and will be published in a few months. He also contemplates the preparation of other works, treating of different phases of our national life and history.

Of all Canadian writers perhaps the name of Mr. G. Mercer Adam is most familiar to the Canadian reading public. Mr. Adam has performed a feat which no other writer in Canada has yet been able to accomplish. He has, with but slight interruption, devoted himself exclusively to literature, without accepting emigration, for the last twenty years. The price he has paid for his temerity has been a long and bitter struggle, but he has remained steadfast to his purpose in spite of the apathy and Philistinism which reigned supreme in Canada in the last decade. He has been in succession critic, book reviewer, educationist, historian, and novelist. It is probable that in much of his work he has not followed the bent of his inclination, but been compelled to address a special audience; but it can never be said that he bartered his independence. He has a clear, forcible style, a keen, critical faculty, and a subtle control of the purest and most classical English. A great deal of his work is of necessity ephemeral, but nevertheless he has put forth some things which are of great intrinsic merit, and will prove of far greater importance to future historians of Canada. For some years he was editor of the Canadian Monthly, which in connection with Professor Goldwin Smith he was instrumental in founding in 1872. The magazine lived longer than any of its pre

decessors or successors in Canada, but it eventually succumbed to neglect. Mr. Adam's most characteristic books are a history of the Northwest and Canada from Sea to Sea, both of which abound in fascinating descriptions of scenery and are permeated with a strong and attractive individuality.

Miss Ethelwyn Wetherald has confessed that her ambition is to be a good editorial

Principal Grant of Queen's University.

writer, as she believes that an editor wields more influence than a poet or a writer of fiction, and "life is a search after power." She has good reason to feel satisfied with her progress, as during the last few years her clear, finely wrought articles signed "Bel Thistlewaite," in the Toronto Globe, have gained for her a large circle of admirers and sometimes combatants; but nevertheless she is a literary woman and not a journalist. Her themes are those which only suggest themselves to an artistic mind, and all her work is permeated with that literary feeling one seldom discovers in the editorial columns of a newspaper. She has always something definite to say, and avoids that pitfall of many woman

Dr. J. G. Bourinot.

writers facile verbiage about nothing in particular and interminable digressions. She contributed regularly to the defunct Canadian Monthly, when it was under the control of Mr. G. Mercer Adam, and her name frequently appears signed to sketches of travel, or articles on social and domestic topics, in the journals of the Western States. She collaborated with Mr. G. Mercer Adam in the production of An Algonquin Maiden, a novel published in Canada and England, which achieved a great success.

There are many other writers of whom I would fain treat at some length, but I am obliged to strangle the inclination in order to bring this article within a reasonable compass. In summing up, however, simple justice compels me to mention a few more names. Miss Sara Jeannette Duncan is perhaps the most finished female Canadian writer. She came prominently before the public a short time ago by travelling leisurely through Japan, China, and India, in company with a lady friend, and is now in London writing accounts of her experiences in the metropolitan journals. Her papers in the Lady's Pictorial, under the title of "A Social Departure," were fresh and sparkling, and have since appeared in book form. Miss Duncan is an old hand at

journalism, and makes a charming travelling companion, being gifted with a vivid imagination and keen, but unobtrusive, observation. Mrs. S. Frances Harrison has written some exceedingly clever sketches, full of a subtle appreciation of the more attractive side of French-Canadian life and character. Mr. Nicholas Flood Davin, who is well known in the Dominion as "the poet, journalist, and orator," is a witty, voluble Irishman, brilliant in his writings and positively dazzling on the floor of the House of Commons. His Eos: An Epic of the Dawn is well worthy of the inspiration of the great Northwest, in which he has made his home. The most ambitious of his prose undertakings is The Irishman in Canada, which is made up of a series of brilliant pen portraits, through whose medium Mr. Davin relates the important parts played by his co-patriots in the history of this country. Mr. Phillips Thompson's Politics of Labor, published by a New York firm, is the result of a life's devotion to the cause, and is one of the most notable contributions to the literature of the labor question that has appeared in recent years. Dr. George Bryce and Dr. W. H. Withrow are both painstaking, conscientious historians; but, excepting the

work of the late Mr. John Macmullen, which is now scarce and in some particulars inaccurate, nothing has yet appeared in Canada worthy of the name of history. Up to the present, all the so-called histories have reflected partyism in almost every chapter, and an impartial history of Canada yet remains to be written. Mr. Charles Lindsey's Rome in Canada is a useful book of reference and will repay perusal, but it is not particularly distinguished for the literary skill it displays. Mr. Charles Mair is the author of Tecumseh, a drama in blank verse, and Dreamland and Other Poems, both of which books breathe the spirit of the lakes and woodlands among which Mr. Mair has lived and worked, and are peculiar (that is, in their inspiration) to the Canadian Northwest. Principal Grant of Queen's University is a man who, like Coleridge or Laurence Oliphant, has all his life promised great things and performed very little. The sum total of his work is insignificant in quantity, but what there is of it is good. His Ocean to Ocean, -a record of a journey across the continent before the days of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, is full of graphic pictures of the shifting population and queer civilization of the Northwest at the time of the "boom," and is essentially readable. Mr. Grant also writes for the Century and other magazines occasionally. Mr. William McLellan's Songs of Old Canada deserves a wider audience than it has yet received; and Mr. Arthur Wier, having made a reputation in Canada, has sought a wider field in the States, where a reputation is more worth having.

Mr. E. W. Thomson is perhaps the only writer in Canada who perfectly understands the technique of the ideal short story. Dr. J. G. Bourinot, the Clerk of the House of Commons, has contributed largely to the ponderous English quarterlies and has written several works on Parliamentary procedure, which have made him authority on such questions in all parts of the British Empire. Mr. John Talon Lesperance is the author of three successful novels, and much good verse. Mr. William Douw Lighthall is a man with a future before him in literature, if he does not allow his ambitions in this direction to be swamped by his occupations as a hard-working lawyer. He is the author of a Sketch of a New Utilitarianism, which gained him the

curiosity in England in regard to this country. Dr. George Stewart, Jr., has written a great deal for the Encyclopædia Britannica, is a member of the International Literary Congress, and contributes on historical subjects to a number of magazines in both England and America. Mr. W. D. Le Sueur is a man who would have made a distinct mark in literature had he had the courage to make the attempt to live solely by his pen, but the enervation of the civil service has handicapped him. He has, however, become identified with progressive thought and is a valued contributor on scientific and semi-literary subjects to the Popular Science Monthly and other leading reviews. Mr. William Kingsford is the author of a monumental History of Canada, the third and fourth volumes of which are still in preparation. The two volumes already published were warmly received in England and the United States.