immortal _Faerie Queene_, or Shakespeare's tender women, the _Juliet_ we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, or Bunyan, Defoe, Addison, Pope and Burke and grim Sam Johnson who made the dictionary and wrote Rasselas, the Prince of Abyssinia, but there is not time for us to go into the subject as minutely as that. At a dinner of this kind, which is so rich in every delicacy which the most sensitive palate could desire, and which boasts wines as delicate and as fragrant in bouquet as one of Mr. Fréchette's sonnets--(Cheers)--and I might add also as one of my friend LeMay's hopefullest lyrics-- (Cheers), it would be ungenerous of me to keep you very long. I will content myself therefore with a remark or two regarding the peculiar features which seem to inspire our literature, at the present time, and by our literature I mean English literature in its broadest sense and amplest significance. Perhaps at no period of letters, in the whole history of literature from the days of Chaucer and Raleigh, from the renaissance, through the classic period, to more modern times, to our own day in fact, has the cultured world seen such a brilliant array of brilliant men and women, who write the English prose which delights our fire-sides, and enriches our minds at the present time. The world has never presented to mankind before, in all its years of usefulness, such a galaxy of great essayists and novelists as we have enjoyed and enjoy now, within a period of fifty or sixty years, and which properly belong to our own age. The era is rich in stalwart minds, in magnificent thinkers, in splendid souls. Carlyle, Emerson, Wilson, Morley, Froude, Holmes, Harrison, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Mill, Buckle, Lewes. In fiction the list is too long for mention, but, in passing, I may note George Eliot--a woman who writes as if her soul had wings, William Black who paints almost as deftly as Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, Reade, William Howells, who has not forgotten to write of the grandeur of the Saguenay, and William Kirby whose _Chien d'Or_ will serve to keep a memory green in many a Quebecer's heart. I need hardly name more. The list could, I am well aware, be extended indefinitely, and as each of you doubtless has your favourite novelist, I need not waste your time by the simple enumeration of men and women who have from time to time, beguiled away the hours with their stories of the heart, or of purpose, or of endeavour.