In becoming a Canadian, Goldwin Smith has not ceased to be an Englishman; he has also desired to become an American, by the way. He holds his English audience through the pages of _The Contemporary_ and _The Nineteenth Century_, and he addresses Americans for some weeks every year from a chair in Cornell University. In Canada he chooses to speak from behind an extremely diaphanous veil--the _nom de plume_ of “A Bystander”; and under this name he for some time issued a small monthly (changed to a quarterly before its discontinuance), which was written entirely by himself, and treated of current events and the thought of the hour. That periodical has now been succeeded by _The Week_, to which the Bystander has been a contributor since the paper was founded. It were out of place to speak here of Goldwin Smith’s career and work in England; it would be telling, too, what is pretty widely known. In Canada his influence has been far deeper than is generally imagined, or than, to a surface-glance, would appear. On his first coming here he was unfairly and relentlessly attacked by what was at the time the most powerful journal in Canada, the Toronto _Globe_; and he has not lacked sharp but irregular antagonism ever since. Somewhat relentless himself, as evinced by his attitude toward the Irish and the Jews, and having always one organ or another in his control, he has long ago wiped out his score against the _Globe_, and inspired a good many of his adversaries with discretion. He devotes all his energy and time, at least so far as the world knows, to work of a more or less ephemeral nature; and when urged to the creation of something permanent, something commensurate with his genius, he is wont to reply that he regards himself rather as a journalist than an author. He would live not by books, but by his mark stamped on men’s minds. It does, indeed, at first sight, surprise one to observe the meagreness of his enduring literary work, as compared with his vast reputation. There is little bearing his name save the volume of collected lectures and essays--chief among them the perhaps matchless historical study entitled “The Great Duel of the Seventeenth Century,”--and the keen but cold monograph on Cowper contributed to the English Men-of-Letters. His visible achievement is soon measured, but it would be hard to measure the wide-reaching effects of his influence. Now, while a sort of conservatism is creeping over his utterances with years, doctrines contrary to those he used so strenuously to urge seem much in the ascendant in England. But in Canada he has found a more plastic material into which, almost without either our knowledge or consent, his lines have sunk deeper. His direct teachings, perhaps, have not greatly prevailed with us. He has not called into being anything like a Bystander party, for instance, to wage war against party government, and other great or little objects of his attack. For