As with general history, so with personal or spiritual history. Biographical writing in Canada is sparse in quantity and, on the whole, insignificant in literary quality. Often the subject of a biographical narrative was great enough to compel imaginative and artistic creation on the part of the writer. Seldom, however, does any biographer of a Canadian man of distinction rise to his subject either in conception or in style. But of those who did rise to their subject, one was Charles Lindsey, who wrote _The Life and Times of William Lyon MacKenzie_. Lindsey handled his material so as to present the proper values in the political and social problems in the time of the famous leader of the Rebellion of 1837. Another of those who rose to his subject and who wrote with a sense of the really significant events in the life of his subject, presenting the salients with decent respect for truth, with adequate detail, and yet with readable style, was Sir Joseph Pope, who gave the literary world a compelling and vigorously moving biographical volume, _Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald_. It is a vigorous narrative, but rather inflexible in style. Sir John Stephen Willison’s _Sir Wilfrid Laurier and The Liberal Party_ is an outstanding biography. Like Lindsey, Sir John Willison was a thoroughly trained journalist before he attempted biographical writing. Along with the journalist’s vigor and vivacity of style, Sir John Willison wrote with feeling for dignified and elegant diction. His _Wilfrid Laurier_ is notable chiefly for its refinement in prose style. George Monro Grant’s _Joseph Howe_ is a _tour de force_ in brilliant word painting and hero worship. It misses the significance of Howe as an original and constructive mind. Longley’s _Joseph Howe_ is a popular narrative, careless of logic and literary style. Several other individual biographies of Canadians by Canadians have been published. The best of them are Duncan Campbell Scott’s _John Graves Simcoe_, Adam Shortt’s _Lord Sydenham_, George M. Wrong’s _Life of Lord Elgin_, Arnold Haultain’s _Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions_, Grant and Hamilton’s _George Monro Grant_, and Edith J. Archibald’s _Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald_. But a genuinely great biography of a great man remains to be written in Canada. Deserving of mention are three short popular biographies—Owen McGillicuddy’s sketch of the life and achievements of Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada, which appears under the title _The Making of a Premier_ (1922); John W. Dafoe’s _Laurier_ (1922) and Peter McArthur’s _Laurier_ (1922). These biographies are by practical journalists, and are journalistic in style. Dafoe’s Laurier is the most acute and weighty.