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On the other hand, the Puritan and Loyalist migrations to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, particularly Nova Scotia, from 1760 to 1783 and later, comprised groups of English-speaking people who were intellectually cultured and spiritually-minded. The literature, verse and prose, which they produced was the urgent expression of political, social, and spiritual needs; and, being for the most part satiric, was modelled on the pre-revolutionary literature of their relatives in New England and the other Atlantic States, which, in its time, had been modelled on the satiric neo-classical verse and the polemic and satiric prose of the eighteenth century in England.

So that the genius of the literature written in the Province of Quebec from the British Occupation of Montreal to the triumph of Responsible Government in 1848, and somewhat later, was pragmatic rather than literary; whereas the genius of the literature produced in the same period in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, particularly in Nova Scotia, was definitively literary in spirit and form.