[2] _Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris_ is from _Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems_ (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto). CHAPTER XVI Novelists THE FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS —LIGHTHALL—SAUNDERS—PARKER—MARQUIS—MACLENNAN AND McILWRAITH— AGNES C. LAUT—WILFRED CAMPBELL—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. THE ROMANCERS OF ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY—THOMPSON SETON—ROBERTS—SAUNDERS —FRASER. THE EVANGELICAL ROMANCERS—RALPH CONNOR—R. E. KNOWLES. _I. The Historical Romancers._ When William Kirby published, in 1877, _The Golden Dog_, he led the way in Canadian historical romance. Major John Richardson had written historical novels years before, but Richardson’s material was largely first hand, from contact with a life and with a setting similar to what he described. We might argue that Kirby ‘discovered’ to the fictionists who were to come after him the wealth of material that lay in the unknown and almost forgotten Canadian past, for he founded his work on Canadian history and infused it with Canadian incident and color; and although Mrs. Leprohon’s romances had a considerable vogue both in English and in French, the circulation of her novels was chiefly local and not anything like so widespread as that of Kirby’s single masterpiece. Yet it is problematic just how much the historical or romantic fiction of the Post-Confederation period (beginning, say, in 1888) owes to Kirby and how much it owes to a stirring impulse of nationality. That impulse produced tangible evidences in our literature because of a conscious realization of national ideals and a sensing of the spirit of a courageous and romantic past in a country that, superficially viewed, had barely reached the stage of ‘growing pains.’