Stephen Leacock is known, by most Canadians, as an important literary humourist (with a gentle Swiftian bite) and political economist. Most do not realize that Leacock wrote some fine books on Canadian history and literary criticism. Many know T.S. Eliot as an incisive and demanding poet, literary critic and dramatist. Both Leacock and Eliot, though, were grounded in a classical High Tory Humanist Anglican way (this is often conveniently ignored by most). It was from such deeper historic places that there was a meeting of minds. Both men had an affinity for the best that had been thought, said and done in the past and the ongoing relevance of such permanent things to the malaise and ethos of their times.
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