frankly insist that we have far too much hasty and slovenly literary work done in Canada. The literary canon which every ambitious writer should have ever in his mind has been stated by no less an authority than Sainte-Beuve: "Devoted to my profession as a critic, I have tried to be more and more a good and if possible an able workman." A good style means artistic workmanship. It is too soon for us in this country to look for a Matthew Arnold or a Sainte-Beuve--such great critics are generally the results, and not the forerunners, of a great literature; but at least if we could have in the present state of our intellectual development, a criticism in the press which would be truthful and just, the essential characteristics of the two authors I have named, the effect would be probably in the direction of encouraging promising writers, and weeding out some literary dabblers. "What I have wished," said the French critic, "is to say not a word more than I thought, to stop even a little short of what I believed in certain cases, in order that my words might acquire more weight as historical testimony." Truth tempered by consideration for literary genius is the essence of sound criticism. We all know that the literary temperament is naturally sensitive to anything like indifference and is too apt, perhaps, to exaggerate the importance of its calling in the prosaic world in which it is exercised. The pecuniary rewards are so few, relatively, in this country, that the man of imaginative mind--the purely literary worker--naturally thinks that he can, at least, ask for generous appreciation. No doubt he thinks, to quote a passage from a clever Australian novel--"The Australian Girl"--"Genius has never been truly acclimatized by the world. The Philistines always long to put out the eyes of poets and make them grind corn in Gaza." But it is well always to remember that a great deal of rough work has to be done in a country like Canada before its Augustan age can come. No doubt literary stimulus must be more or less wanting in a colony where there is latent at times in some quarters a want of self-confidence in ourselves and in our institutions, arising from that sense of dependency and habit of imitation and borrowing from others that is a necessity of a colonial condition. The tendency of the absence of sufficient self-assertion is to cramp intellectual exertion, and make us believe that success in literature can only be achieved in the old countries of Europe. That spirit of all-surrounding materialism to which Lowell has referred must also always exercise a certain sinister influence in this way--an influence largely exerted in Ontario--but despite all this we see that even among our neighbours it has not prevented the growth of a literary class famous for its intellectual successes in varied fields of literature. It is for Canadian writers to have always before them a high ideal, and remember that literature does best its duty--to quote