Lord Durham wrote, over fifty [Errata: (from final page) for _fifty_ read _forty_.] years ago, of the French Canadians: 'They are a people without a history and a literature.' He was very ignorant, assuredly, of the deep interest that attaches to the historic past of the first pioneers in Canada, and had he lived to the present day, he would have blotted out the first part of the statement. But he was right enough when he added that the French Canadians had, at that time, no literature of their own. During the two centuries and more that Canada remained a French Colony, books were neither read nor written; they were only to be seen in the educational establishments, or in a very few private houses, in the later days of the colony. [Footnote: The priests appear to have only encouraged books of devotion. La Hontan mentions an incident of a priest coming into his room and tearing up a book; but the library of that gay gentleman was hardly very select and proper.] An intellectual torpor was the prevailing feature of the French _regime_. Only now and then do we meet in the history of those early times with the name of a man residing in the colony with some reputation for his literary or scientific attainments. The genial, chatty L'Escarbot has left us a pleasant volume of the early days of Acadie, when De Monts and De Poutrincourt were struggling to establish Port Royal. The works of the Jesuits Lafitau and Charlevoix are well known to all students of the historic past of Canada. The Marquis de la Galissoniere was the only man of culture among the functionaries of the French dominion. Parkman tells us that the physician Sarrazin, whose name still clings to the pitcher-plant (_Sarracenia purpurea_) was for years the only real medical man in Canada, and was chiefly dependent for his support on the miserable pittance of three hundred francs yearly, given him by the king. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose there was no cultivated society in Canada. The navigator Bougainville tells us, that, though education was so defective, the Canadians were naturally very intelligent, and their accent was as good as that of the Parisians. Another well-informed writer says 'there was a select little society in Quebec, which wants nothing to make it agreeable. In the salons of the wives of the Governor and Intendant one finds circles as brilliant as in other countries. Science and the Fine Arts have their turn, and conversation does not flag. The Canadians breathe from their birth an air of liberty, which makes them very pleasant in the intercourse of life, and our language is nowhere more purely spoken.' But the people outside of the little coterie, of which this writer speaks so flatteringly, had no opportunities whatever of following the progress of new ideas in the parent state. What learning there was could only be found among the priests, to whom we owe 'Les Relations des Jesuites,' among other less notable productions. The Roman Catholic Church, being