Although he earned his reputation in the 1880s as an expert on British and especially on Canadian parliamentary procedure, John George Bourinot is remembered today as one of nineteenth-century Canada's most prominent and incisive cultural critics. As a man of letters, he promoted Canadian interests by writing historical fiction and essays, by helping to establish and administer the Royal Society of Canada, and by involving himself in the popular cause then known as imperial federation. Yet his major publications, still consulted by statesmen and students of constitutional law, do not reflect the breadth of his interests or the scope of his reputation. Many of his purely literary contributions, for example, remain buried in the unindexed pages of Canadian monthly magazines and weekly belles-lettres reviews, such as Stewart's, the New Dominion, the Canadian Monthly, and the Week. In his day, however, even his legal and political commentaries were read...