As to the aims and methods of the members of the Traditional and the Academic Schools:—In general, Reade and Griffin wrote critically, to illuminate universal literature (poetry, fiction, drama, social life, and history). The members of the Academic or Dilettante School have, on the whole, the same aim, but sometimes they write critical essays as a fine art in the department of _belles-lettres_. Reade and Griffin wrote on literature and life in brief but scholarly journalistic essays. Professors Cappon, Alexander, Edgar, and MacMechan wrote or write monographs (as, for instance, Cappon’s fine study of the poetry of C. G. D. Roberts) or critical introductions and prefatory essays to selected English men of letters (as, for instance, Alexander’s admirable _Introduction to Browning_ or MacMechan’s scholarly Introductions to his _Selections from Tennyson_ and Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_). Dr. Macphail and Mr. Haultain delight in the critical essay for its own sake, and are more solicitous about beauty or dignity of style than about substance or thought. Their essays belong to the department of _belles-lettres_—not always and not essentially, but in tendency, form, and aesthetic dignity or style. In particular, whenever the members of the first two schools have written about any phase of the literary history and the literature of Canada, or about any author who has figured notably in that history and literature, they have been rigorously aesthetic and critical. But the writers of the Traditional School differ from those of the Academic or Dilettante School in critical attitude to Canadian literature and literary history. Reade and Griffin wrote sympathetically, and with sincere admiration, about phases of Canadian Literature; but they showed little or no understanding of the historic process in the evolution of Canadian culture, of the continuity of Canadian literary history. How, then, could they have been more than merely aesthetic—how could they have been genuinely critical—if they had not the philosophic eye, did not look before and after, and thus did not treat the phases of Canadian Literature from the point of view of its implied relations to the whole of Canadian life and of English literature, of which Canadian verse and prose form a part? Sympathetically, politely, and charmingly as Reade wrote about the phases of Canadian Literature, his criticism, to employ a phrase of M. Jules Lemaitre, was ‘not criticism, but entertaining conversation.’ Virtually it denied that Canada possessed a literature, a body of poetry and prose which should be regarded as a real integer, having unity of inspiration and a continuous growth from crude thought and form to respectable aesthetic and artistic dignity. It implied only that in the literature of Canada there are no ‘highways,’ but only pleasant ‘by-ways’ which invite the essayist to write of them with aesthetic appreciation. This is not philosophical, not genuine,