In 1749 there was a migration of English from the Motherland to Halifax. They founded the City of Halifax. These English _émigrés_, however, found conditions of life at Halifax so forbidding by way of hardships and so socially unsettling that many of them removed to Boston and to New York. Subsequently their descendants came from New England and New York to Halifax. It was they, not their fathers, who really founded the City of Halifax and did most for the development of commerce and culture in that community. Later, when Halifax became a British Military and Naval Station, it took on an English ‘air.’ But essentially its culture and commerce were of New England Puritan origin. In 1773 occurred the Scots migration to Pictou, on the North shore of Nova Scotia. These colonists were but a little band of two hundred; yet they brought with them two ideals which eventually pervaded the civilization and culture of Canada. Viewed, then, synoptically, the civilization and culture of the Dominion of Canada, as we conceive and appreciate the significance of Canada to-day, had their origins in Puritanism and Calvinism—in the ideals brought into Nova Scotia and the Canadas by the New England and the Scots Migrations in the 18th century. Specifically, the New England colonists, especially the Loyalists, brought, with them the literary ideals which were to become the creative principles of the first native-born poets and prose writers of Nova Scotia and the Canadas. Specifically, the Scots colonists brought into Nova Scotia two ideals of spiritual import; namely, the ideal of the supreme worth of the individual human spirit and its salvation, and the ideal of sound intellectual education as the basis of the life of the spirit both for this world and the world to come. To appreciate critically the results of the Loyalist ideals on the creative literary spirit in Nova Scotia, we must hark back to pre-Revolutionary times in New England and the other Atlantic Colonies and to the social conditions and spiritual problems of the people of Nova Scotia following the Loyalist Migrations. In pre-revolutionary days in the New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, the weapon used both by those who were for separation from England and those who were loyal to the British Crown was a literary weapon—prose and poetry. Naturally pre-revolutionary literature in the American Colonies was modelled on the mood and form of the satiric verse and pamphlets of the 18th century poets and prosemen of England. The American colonies became alive especially with poetic satirists. When, therefore, the Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia and the Canadas, and when, in due course, they themselves had to face the discussion and solution of new social and political problems, inevitably they adopted the 18th century forms of literary expression.