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.

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