I do not for one depreciate the influence of good fiction on the minds of a reading community like ours; it is inevitable that a busy people, and especially women distracted with household cares, should always find that relief in this branch of literature which no other reading can give them; and if the novel has then become a necessity of the times in which we live, at all events I hope Canadians, who may soon venture into the field, will study the better models, endeavour to infuse some originality into their creations and plots, and not bring the Canadian fiction of the future to that low level to which the school of realism in France, and in a minor degree in England and the United States, would degrade the novel and story of every-day life. To my mind it goes without saying that a history written with that fidelity to original authorities, that picturesqueness of narration, that philosophic insight into the motives and plans of statesmen, that study and comprehension of the character and life of a people, which should constitute the features of a great work of this class,--that such a history has assuredly a much deeper and more useful purpose in the culture and education of the world than any work of fiction can possibly have even when animated by a lofty genius. Still as the novel and romance will be written as long as a large proportion of the world amid the cares and activities of life seeks amusement rather than knowledge, it is for the Canadian Scott, or Hawthorne, or "George Eliot," or Dickens of the future, to have a higher and purer aim than the majority of novel writers of the present day, who, with a few notable exceptions like Black, Besant, Barrie, Stephenson or Oliphant, weary us by their dulness and lack of the imaginative and inventive faculty, and represent rather the demands of the publishers to meet the requirements of a public which must have its new novel as regularly as the Scotchman must have his porridge, the Englishman his egg and toast, and the American his ice-water.