The newspapers of those days were very few and came only at uncertain times to the home of the farmer by the side of some stream or amid the dense forest, or to the little hamlets that were springing up in favoured spots, and represented so many radiating influences of intelligence on the borders of the great lakes and their tributary streams, on the Atlantic seaboard, or on the numerous rivers that form so many natural highways to the people of the maritime provinces. These newspapers were for years mostly small quarto or folio sheets, in which the scissors played necessarily the all-important part; but there was, nevertheless, before 1840 in the more pretentious journals of the large towns, some good writing done by thoughtful men who studied their questions, and helped to atone for the very bitter vindictive partisan attacks on opponents that too frequently sullied the press in those times of fierce conflict.[16] Books were only found in the homes of the clergy or of the official classes, and these were generally old editions and rarely the latest publications of the time. Montreal and Quebec, for many years, were the only places where bookstores and libraries of more than a thousand volumes could be seen. It was not until 1813 that a successful effort was made to establish a "social library" at Kingston, Bath, and some other places in the Midland district. Toronto had no library worth mentioning until 1836. What culture existed in those rude days was to be hunted up among the clergy, especially of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic priests of Lower Canada, and the official classes of the large towns. Some sermons that have come down to us, in pamphlets of very common paper--and very few were printed in those days when postage was dear and bookselling was not profitable--have no pretensions to originality of thought or literary style: sermons in remarkable contrast with the brilliant and suggestive utterances of such modern pulpit orators as Professor Clarke, of Trinity. The exhaustive and, generally, closely reasoned sermons of the Presbyterian divine had a special flavour of the Westminster confession and little of the versatility of preachers like Principal Grant in these later times when men are attempting to make even dogma more genial, and to understand the meaning of the sermon in the Mount. Then, as always in Canada, there were found among the clergy of all denominations hardworking, self-denying priests and missionaries who brought from time to time to some remote settlement of the provinces spiritual consolation and to many a household, long deprived of the intellectual nourishment of other days, an opportunity of conversing on subjects which in the stern daily routine of their lives in a new country were seldom or ever talked of. It was in the legislative halls of the provinces that the brightest intellect naturally found scope for its display, and at no subsequent period