A pragmatic people, as are the Canadians, have little or no taste for the Whimsical Essay. The matter of the whimsical essay counts for nothing. Its appeal is altogether by way of piquancy in what is said. Piquancy—not mordancy! For mordancy would only make what is said satiric, and cause pain. The whimsical essay must cause mere smiles and chuckles. It must be _clever_—and nothing more. Canadians are beginning to turn more and more to this form of Essay. Its character and manner are well exemplified in William A. Deacon’s _Pens and Pirates_ (1923). The essays in this volume have novelty of theme, over which plays precisely the light of a ‘whimsical’ fancy and humor. They are informed, however, with the strictly literary color of allusion and quotation from the poets and prosemen of all ages to the present, but in such an incidental and light way that there is no show of pedantry. The allusion and quotation are natural to Mr. Deacon’s professional office as a reviewer of contemporary literature. His style is journalistic in the French sense—‘style _coupe_’—as regards sentence length. But he adds a piquancy to it which makes it somewhat ‘winged’ and which thus pleasantly engages the sensibility. No Canadian as yet has appeared as a systematic writer of the Critical Essay. Such essays of this genre as were published have been ‘fugitive,’ and their aim and method have been pragmatic and pedagogical rather than literary. There is, however, much room and great need in Canada for systematic Essays in Criticism which shall have dignity of thought, imaginative light, and grace or power of style, and which in themselves shall be literature. Thomas O’Hagan’s Essays in _Canadian Literature_ are too fragmentary and didactic to be literature, though they are literary. L. J. Burpee’s _A Little Book of Canadian Essays_ contains brief but illuminating critical studies of seven Canadian writers. Stephen Leacock’s _Essays and Literary Studies_ are too heterogeneous in theme and too variable (perhaps variegated) in style to be credited with the dignity of systematic Essays in Criticism. They are interesting but not weighty literary ‘Studies.’ The master critic has yet to appear in Canada. CHAPTER XXIX Anthologies CANADIAN BIRTHDAY BOOK (SERANUS)—DEWART’s SELECTIONS FROM CANADIAN POETS—LIGHTHALL’S ‘SONGS OF THE GREAT DOMINION’—OXFORD BOOK OF CANADIAN VERSE—GARVIN’S CANADIAN POETS, ETC.