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Following 1760 and the British Occupation of Montreal and Quebec City, the civilization and culture of the social groups in these centres and, later, in the Loyalist centres in Ontario, were on another and lower level than the culture and civilization in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Moreover, the literature written by the groups of English-speaking people, sojourning or permanently resident in the Canadas, neither sprang from the social and spiritual necessities which created the literature of the Maritime Provinces in their Puritan and Loyalist period, nor possessed the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of the literature produced in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the Puritan and Loyalist period of their history.

The Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture in Montreal and Quebec, after the British Occupation (1760), was highly military and practical; that is to say, materialistic. For the English-speaking people in Quebec were concerned wholly with the civil and military administration of Quebec City and Province, and the English-speaking people in Montreal were concerned chiefly with the development of trade, particularly the fur trade, under men who were adventurers much more than they were colonizers and civilizers. Naturally, therefore, Canadian Literature in English in the Province of Quebec chiefly consisted of chronicles, annals, and narratives (historical, or of adventure); and, secondly, whenever it happened to be pure literature, comprised verse and prose written by cultured visitors from the Motherland; and thus in all cases this ‘Incidental’ Pioneer Canadian Literature in English in the Province of Quebec was British in inspiration, form, and aim.