The Rise of Canada from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilization

"The beauty of a book, as of a picture, consists in the grouping of images and in the arrangement of details. Not only has attitude and grouping to be attended to by the painter, and by the narrator of events, but attention must be paid to light and shade; and the same subject is susceptible of being treated in many ways. When the idea occurred to me of offering to the public of Canada a history of the province, I was not ignorant of the existence of other histories. Smith, Christie, Garneau, Gourlay, Martin and Murray, the narratives of the Jesuit Fathers, Charlevoix, the Journals of Knox, and many other histories and books, were more or less familiar to me; but there was then no history, of _all_ Canada from the earliest period to the present day so concisely written, and the various events and personages, of which it is composed, so grouped together, as to present an attractive and striking picture to the mind of every reader."