12 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Quebec we have one type well marked and wonderfully well adapted 
to the uses of literature, and Anglo Canadian as well as French Can- 
adian literature has promptly responded to it. 
The U. E. Loyalist settlement of Upper Canada and of the Lower 
Provinces laid the foundations of another type, but into this has been 
poured such a large body of English, Irish, Scotch and German popu- 
lation, that the process of fusion has been retarded. The new material 
may never be completely assimilated and the final result will probably 
be a composite type, the form of which is only beginning to appear. 
As a consequence, a great part of our literature still reflects the char- 
acter or type imported from another land, and, if we would describe 
it, we must use a compound word and call it Scotch Canadian or Irish 
Canadian or English Canadian. ‘And yet, ever here, the Canadian im- 
press is discernible and becomes more and more distinct. It lightens 
up the sombre aspect of the Scotch, it curbs the dogged assertiveness 
of the English, it cools the impetuous ardour of the Irish. It com- 
hines many of the virtues and not a few of the vices of all, but it adds 
to them an optimism, a self-reliance, and a versatility of genius born 
of the atmosphere and necessities of this new land. In no part of 
our country is this process of the inspiration of a new character more 
manifest than in the youngest, the newborn west. It has not yet found 
a tongue in our literature. Our poets still sing of the vanishing 
redman rather than of the incoming thousands; but as the crowds of 
immigrants land on the prairie a living spirit of hope and high enter- 
prise seems to seize them and transform them, and that spirit will be 
the mark of the western Canadian to come — and will stamp itself on 
a literature yet to be. 
It is this adolescent condition of our national history, character 
and literature which creates some embarrassment in our attempt to 
answer the second question. Can our literature be studied from the 
higher point of view of its historical evolution as to style, spirit and 
content? Even in the older United States the style of American 
literature is not quite so well marked as to distinguish it perfectly from 
that of England. The spirit and content are somewhat more definitely 
marked. But as yet all the younger English speaking lands must 
continue to be indebted to the mother land for that which stands forth 
as epoch making in English literature, and which gives us a well 
developed process of evolution as a subject of study. The shorter life 
of Canadian, or even, of American literature, has at best but produced 
a variety, and all higher study of literature must deal with the liter- 
ature of the English speaking race rather than with its younger branches. 
But even here our most advanced students may find a field for the 
