The Irishman in Canada. By Nicholas Flood Davin. (S. Low
and Co., London ; Maclean and Co., Toronto.)—At first sight, it does not seem a particularly "happy thought" to write in separate volumes histories of the German in Canada, the Scot in Canada, and the Irishman in Canada, but after a perusal of this handsome and enter- taining volume, we are not in a mood to find fault with the scheme. It would have been impossible in a more formal and ambitious history of the Dominion to introduce one-half of the personages who figure in Mr. Davin's volume, and yet for the most part they are well worthy of such chance of immortality as by this record they may obtain. By far the most interesting part of the volume is the first half of it. The accounts of the first Lord Dorchester and of Colonel Talbot are given with uncommon vivacity, and relate to a comparatively little-known period of our history. The same may be said of the story of Lord Metcalfe's career, though Sir John Kayo's life of him is bettor known than the sources on which Mr. Davin has drawn for his earlier information. Mr. Davin's eloquence occasionally runs away with him ; the reader has constantly (to use a phrase which deserves to become famous) to "make allowance for the windage." We had marked several passages to illustrate this point, but the handsome, albeit somewhat involved compliment to this journal on page 665 stays our hand. We will spare our readers the compliment, but if we, as Mr. Davin says," grew dithy- rambic" on some occasion, what does he candidly think of the following sentence of his own, in immediate context with his criticism of the Spectator ?—
"Lord Dufferin, it was said, while still at home, breathed forth no each notes of triumphant confidence in the future of the Empire as character- ised this famous speech, which was like a breath from the mountains on the fevered brow of the editor in the close office near Waterloo Bridge, under the refreshing influence of which he seems to break away from the dungeon of dulled ambition, contracted hopes and ignoble fears, from the suffocating atmosphere which in recent years, and up to a very late period, a mean statesmanship cast over the country of Raleigh, and ho gasps out to inhale great draughts of Lord Dufferin's stimulating thought, like Marie Stuart, in Schiller's play, when she is allowed to ramble from her confinement into the grounds surrounding her castel- lated prison."
And yet the Spectator is "dithyrambic," when all we said was that an Irishman only required room and something big to do, "big enough to overcome in him that temptation to the grandiose which is in most Irishmen the most visible intellectual defect." Mr. Davin seems to have gone out of his way to confirm our remark.
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