CANADIAN HISTORICAL NOVELS-JOSEPH 

 MARMETTE, THE NOVELIST. 



Much respected reader, with your permission let us 

 have a ramble, a short one though it be, over the 

 " pastures green " of Canadian literature. It will add 

 to our zest and sharpen our appetite, when we resume 

 our " Notes on the Lower St. Lawrence. " Shall we 

 dignify these " green pastures " with the name of a 

 garden ? If so, rest assured that as such it will be, at 

 best, but a pale copy of those, radiant under European 

 suns. Our lawns are less velvety ; perfumed groves, 

 brilliant parterres and rockeries are here wanting. 

 The beds and borders might be better filled ; the 

 flowers, of hues more vivid, more varied ; the curves 

 to the avenues, more majestic ; the terraces artistically 

 sloped ; the entire landscape, in fact, more imposing. 

 But if deficient in art is not the land rich, rich in the 

 extreme, in native beauty ? 



In this northern Elysium we call our home, our 

 sweet Canadian home, has not nature herself provided 

 for us the soft violet, the graceful ferns, the scented 

 eglantine, the perfume-breathing wild rose, and the 

 myriads of bright sweet blossoming perennials with which 

 Spring decks every nook of the forest, every mountain, 

 glen, whenever Winter relaxes his grasp ? 



Our literature resembles our wild flowers in their 

 uncultivated grace ; like them, in order to put forth 

 blossoms of promise, it needs the sunshine of sympathy, 

 the fecundating showers of public support ; like 

 them, too, it would, occasionally be the better of the 

 pruning-knife of criticism, to remove its sapless twigs 

 and its ungainly branches. 



