The next Canadian systematic humorist, though not Canadian-born, is Stephen Leacock. Haliburton was a creator; he really invented, his method of satiric humor, or if he did not invent the method, he at least originally created his comic characters. Leacock, who is ‘a graft on the Canadian literary tree,’ models his humor considerably after the American manner. It is satiric burlesque deliberately constructing around serious character or events extravagant nonsense which is a sort of criticism of manners and morals of society, but which tends to engage us more as burlesque than as criticism. Mr. Leacock’s first book was entitled _Literary Lapses_, published at Montreal in 1910. It was, as the author’s Preface states, for the most part a collection of sketches which had before that date appeared in print in various magazines. Two of the sketches gained the distinction of being reprinted in _Punch_ and _The Lancet_, London. These were respectively Leacock’s _Boarding House Geometry_ and _The New Pathology_, the latter of which had the further distinction of being reprinted in translations in various German periodicals. His _Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town_ approaches more closely to the unity of a regular novel than any of his other books and is the highest example of his art. His style here is personal and familiar almost to undue flippancy; it is witty and sparkling even to brilliancy; it is less literary than the material of the _Mariposa Newspacket_; it is surrounded with an exuberant atmosphere of burlesque. Yet in _Sunshine Sketches_ he has achieved an unmistakably true characterization of the average ‘little town’ of Canada—its life and its people—a life which shows the universal touch that makes the whole world akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible of portrayal except by one who has lived it. There is here revealed much of the usually uncovered side of human nature, lit up with a glow of amusement at the foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy.