Most of the action in Mrs. Brooke’s second novel, “Emily Montague,” is laid in Canada, which country Mrs. Brooke had visited. The book represents her enjoyment of the strange scenes about her. The beauty of the river Montmorenci more than repays Miss Arabella Fermor for the fatigues of a voyage across the Atlantic. The hero finds that the streams and mountains of England seem petty when he is in the presence of the majesty and sublimity of the western world. The descriptions are perhaps over-elaborate, but they are not ineffective, and they show much closer knowledge of natural phenomena and more real interest in them, than do the tamer passages in the preceding novel. In the famous “Castle of Otranto” (Walpole, 1764) there is no use whatever of Nature. In Brooke’s “Fool of Quality” (1766) the sky is fitly spoken of as “a stupendous expanse sumptuously furnished with a profusion of planets.” Certainly no other sort of sky would have presumed to bend down over Mr. Brooke’s stupendous little prig of a hero. The chief use of Nature, however, is in similes for Harry’s countenance which is “like sunshine on a dark day,” or a “lake on a summer’s evening showing heaven in its bosom,” or, if bathed in tears as it frequently was, “like the sun in a shower.” The charm of “The Vicar of Wakefield” (Goldsmith, 1766) rests upon its sweetness and purity, its quaint humor, and its quality of fresh, open-air wholesomeness. Its use of Nature is of the most casual, unemphasized sort. There are not in the whole work twenty-five lines concerning the country scenes in which all the action takes place. And yet these simple, direct phrases have a magical power of suggestion. The seat under the hawthorn where the family drank their tea and watched the sunset, the dinner in the hayfield, the brief description of the little farm, have in them the power of reality and do more to give a free, out-of-doors atmosphere to the story than all Mrs. Brooke’s panegyrics. But here, as in Goldsmith’s other works, the stress is on the characters, and the little, truthful pictures of Nature seem almost accidental. In Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey” (1768) there is no use of external Nature. Of Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling” (1771) the same may be said unless, indeed, we except one reference to a scene “not unlike Salvator’s backgrounds.”