Canadian Essays
by Thomas O'Hagan (9780217312059)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FRENCH CANADIAN LIFE AND LITERATURE. A STRANGER visiting the Province of Quebec, or, as we shall designate it here, French Canada, realizes at once that he is among a people differentiated in life, language, institutions and customs from the inhabitants of Ontario, Nova Scotia and the New England States. He feels about him the atmosphere of French life and thought, and finds himself face to face with one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern times?the phenomenon of a people, planted upon the banks of the St. Lawrence nearly three centuries ago, maintaining in fullest integrity their homogeneity amid the disintegrating influences of altered political institutions and the resistless sweep of Anglo- Saxon speech and commercial domination. It is a phenomenon which contradicts the very philosophy and teachings of history, for were it to accord with the teachings of history, then the English conquerors who, in 1759, replaced the French standard with the ensign of Great Britain, should have long since absorbed and assimilated the conquered race. But the French of Quebec have resisted all assimilation. Nay, more, they have not only continued to flourish?to increase and multiply within their own original borders?but they have spread from east to west, leaving, as a writer has recently said, the literal imprint of their footsteps on the geographical chart of America from New England to the base of the Rocky Mountains, and all over the Mississippi Valley. Nor has their progress stopped here. Not content with physical advancement, they have gone farther, and founded a literary microcosm of their own?created a literature with a color, form and flavor all its own, which must be considered in itself a greater marvel than even their material preservation. As you move amongst the pe...

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