As to why Canada has no distinctive and great literature--I confess frankly I do not know. England had only Canada's population when a Shakespeare and a Milton rose like stars above the world. Scotland and Ireland both have a smaller population than Canada, and their ballads are sung all over the world. Canada has had a multitude of sweet singers pipe the joys of youth, but as life broadened and deepened their songs did not reach to the deeps and the heights. Something arrested development. They did not go on. Why? It may be that literature rises only as high as its fountain springs--the people; and that the people of Canada have not yet realized themselves clearly enough to recognize or give articulation to a national literature. It may be that Canada is living her literature rather than writing it. If Scott had not found appreciation for his articulation of Scottish life and history in poems and novels, he would not have gone on. In fact, when Byron eclipsed Scott in public favor as a poet, Scott stopped writing poetry. It may be that Canada has not become sufficiently unified--cemented in blood and suffering--to appreciate a literature that distinctively interprets her life and history. It may be that she has been swamped by the alien literature of alien lands, for the writers of English to-day are legion. Or it may be the deeper cause beneath the dearth of world literature just now--lack of that peace, that joyous calm, that repose of soul and freedom from distraction, that permits a creator to give of his best. One sometimes hears Canadians--particularly in England--accused of crudity in speech. I confess I like the crudities, the rawness, the colloquialisms. They smack of the new life in a new land. I should be sorry if Canadians ever began to Latinize their sentences, to "can" their speech and pickle it in the vinegar pedantry of the peeved study-chair critic. Because it is a land of mountain pines and cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure their phrases to suit the yard stick of some starveling pedant in a writer's attic, who had never been nearer reality than his own starvation. I can see no superiority in the Englishman's colloquialisms of "runnin'," "playin'," "goin'," to the Canadian's "cut it out," "get out," "beat it." One is the slovenliness of languor. The other is the rawness of vigor. VI