4 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



contact with the historical schools of Great Britain, promoted espec- 

 ially by the institution of the Rhodes Scholarships, has been a potent 

 helper, and still more potent perhaps is the splendid work done by 

 Dr. Doughty and his colleagues at the archives, more especially in 

 London by Mr. H. P. Biggar. Ottawa is now the Mecca of the 

 Canadian Plistorian ; books, pamphlets, original MSS, and transcripts 

 of European papers; here they are in rich profusion. Nor must I 

 omit to mention Dr. Doughty's friend and colleague, Dr. Adam 

 Shortt, who early set to us younger men the tradition of sound learning 

 and of breadth of view, of dry-as-dust digging among our original 

 sources combined with a constant touch with British and American 

 scholarship. 



Let us turn from Arts which demand the support either of a small 

 body of wealthy patrons, or of enlightened universities and govern- 

 ments, to those whose roots must be set in a soil large and extended 

 as well as deep and rich. Historians are people without imagination 

 enough to be novelists, and novelists are people without imagination 

 enough to be poets. The history which we have been composing in 

 Canada is thorough, self-respecting work; but it demands a trained 

 mind and some breadth of outlook rather than those higher creative 

 faculties which distinguish a Thucydides, a Michelet or a Carlyle. In 

 the higher reaches of creative imagination we are still to some extent 

 deficient; indeed we cannot be said in all respects even to have re- 

 deemed our early promise. 



The causes of this are various, but one of them at least is to our 

 honour, and would have pleased old Thomas Carlyle. We have 

 WTOught rather than written, have been laborious rather than lyrical. 

 In time of peace we have built bridges and dug ditches, and brought 

 our crops to market; in time of war we have poured out our blood; 

 and we have left to a later generation to tell worthily the epic of the 

 railway builders, and to sing the undying deeds of those whose rich 

 blood is wrought into the essential fibre of our nation. Literature 

 always comes late. As Hegel said "The owl of Minerva does not take 

 her flight till the shades of eve begin to fall." Sir Sidney Lee has pointed 

 out that till near the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth English 

 Culture was almost wholly a reflexion of that of France and of Italy. 

 England was not only breaking the might of Spain; she was also 

 absorbing, assimilating, working into her national life all that was 

 best of European art and life ; till in Spenser and Shakespeare and the 

 great Elizabethans — who were for the most part the great Jacobeans — 

 the universal and the national were blended. So may it be with us! 



In fiction I could name many names, and could give to each its 

 just word of praise. That quick Canadian eye which made our 



