IN

N ancient times of Western Canadian history, when Ontario was in its cradle, and the lively young papoose was opening its eyes to gaze wonderingly at the first stray glimpses of sunshine among its pine forests and uncleared bush, a Scottish lad, then just coming of age, sailed from Greenock for New York, in the month of August, 1799. Upper Canada was the destined field of his life-work, and Kingston the place of his destination.

General Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, a man of rare sagacity and foresight, had conceived magnificent plans for the improvement of the young colony, as a rival to the recently revolted States. The site of its future capital was already selected by him on the Bay of Toronto, and the ephemeral wigwams of the Missassagua savage were giving place to more substantial log huts and frame dwellings. He had devised schemes for the liberal endowment of educational institutions adapted to the wants of the Province, when it should emerge from its infantile rudeness; and accordingly a favouring despatch from the Duke of Portland, in 1797, had responded to an address from the Provincial Parliament, praying His Majesty "to appropriate a portion of the waste lands of the Crown for the establishment and support of a Grammar School in each district, and also of a College or University for the instruction of youth in the different branches of liberal knowledge." Surely never were waste lands appropriated to wiser use. The plan was still in embryo; but every year's delay left the rising generation to grow up devoid of the training that should fit them for self-government; and the energetic Lieutenant Governor was impatient to make a beginning.

He accordingly gave authority to two members of his Council to secure the requisitely gifted instructor. They, in their turn, applied to friends in Scotland, and their first choice showed that the confidence had not been misplaced.

Among a group of students at the ancient University of St. Andrews, three youths of nearly the same age were there united together by common tastes and sympathies, in a friendship only broken by death. One of these, Thomas Duncan, died in honoured old age, Professor of Mathematics in that University; another, Thomas Chalmers. lived to fili professorial chairs at St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and to win himself a name among the foremost of the great and good in his native land; the third, John Strachan, survived both of his early friends, made his mark in a new world, and on a young country, that then lay in embryo among the uncleared pine-forests of Western Canada, and closed his career as Bishop of the first Diocese of the Anglican Church, built up, mainly by his own exertions, among the clearings of its vast wilderness.

Thomas Chalmers was the first choice of those entrusted with the selection of a director for the educational system of Upper Canada; and curious is it to reflect how different might have been the future, not of Canada only, but of Scotland, had his sagacious organizing abilities and wise philanthropy found an arena for their exercise in the moulding of this young State. But it was not so to be. Happily, for Scotland at least, Thomas Chalmers clung to his native soil; and so the next choice fell on his friend and fellow-student, John Strachan.

The future Bishop of Toronto was by birth and early training an Aberdonian.

His father, the overseer of a granite quarry near Aberdeen, was killed by a sudden explosion in the quarry, when his son was only in his fifteenth year. He is said to have been a non-juror, and his native district is well known as one where the old non-juring Episcopalians have left many traces of their former predominance. It may be doubted, how ever, if this exercised any influence on the opinions of the boy. His mother was then, and remained through life, a Presbyterian. She was, moreover, a woman of much sagacity and decision of character; and from her he not only received his early training, but also inherited the energy and talent which distinguished him through his long and singularly active career. Dr. James Beattie, then Professor of Moral Philosophy in Marischal College, but better known as the author of "The Minstrel," took an interest in the orphan; found him a situation as tutor to a little boy and girl; and so enabled him ere long to carry home his little earnings-the first of many generous gifts of like kind to his widowed mother.

The bursaries and other educational endowments of Aberdeen schools and colleges are exceptionally abundant; and with their aid and his own tutorial labours, he scrambled through his preliminary studies with creditable diligence; took his degree, and soon after removed to St. Andrews, there to prosecute his theological studies with a view to the ministry of the Scottish Church. At St. Andrews he found himself in a congenial circle. In the debating society of St. Mary's College he had for fellow students, John Leyden, the poet, John Campbell, the future Lord Chancellor, and his own special friends, Thomas Duncan and Thomas Chalmers.

In an episcopal charge delivered in 1860, Dr. Strachan gave an interesting review of his own career; and of those early friends he remarks: "We were all three nearly of the same age, and our friendship only terminated with death, being kept alive by a constant correspondence during more than

sixty years." But like many another Scottish student, he had to find the means of present subsistence while prosecuting his studies; so he sought and obtained a parish school in the neighbourhood, worth about £30 per annum. ness has been displayed in reference to the early creed of the future bishop. Nothing is more certain than that an abjuration of prelacy, as well as of every other form of dissent from the Scottish Presbyterian Church, could alone secure him the mastership of a parish school. In reality we can discern in him not a few traces of the zeal of the convert; as where, in his first episcopal address, after he had been to England, and seen its Church with his own eyes, he pronounces it to be "a spotless model of the primitive Church; one august, incorruptible and glorious verity." He was still only nineteen when he learned that the more lucrative mastership of the neighbouring parish school of Kettle was vacant. He accordingly offered himself as a candidate, and we have heard him tell with lively humour of the verdict pronounced by Professor Hunter, who had undertaken to test his fitness for the post. After due examination in the prescribed requisites, the youthful candidate was encouraged to prosecute his application by this cautious verdict: "Well, you're no great things, John; but you'll be the best of the lot!" And so it proved. He was successful over much older candidates; and was forthwith placed in charge of a school numbering at times a hundred and twenty pupils,—some of them older, and many of them bigger than himself.

Some needless sensitive

Among the nameless rustics who formed the pupils at Kettle Grammar School, one in whom the new master took a special interest, has since become known to all as the famed painter, Sir David Wilkie. Preceptor and scholar met in London after an interval of thirty years. They both attended the meeting of the British Association at Bir

mingham, the same year; and the great painter gratefully recalled the interposition of his old master, by means of which his uncle was induced to place him under the celebrated painter, Sir Henry Raeburn, and so start him on the road to fame and fortune. Meanwhile to the young master the larger emoluments of the Kettle school had seemed a fortune. They enabled him to render substantial aid to his widowed mother and sisters; and for the next two years :—

"There in his noisy mansion skill'd to rule,

The village master taught his little school." At the close of that brief incumbency, on the refusal of the proffered Canadian Grammar School and embryo college, with its promised salary of £80, by his friend Thomas Chalmers, it was accepted by him, and so a novel direction was given to his whole future career. He set out with more definite prospects than usually cheer the Scot in his wanderings abroad. But they proved illusory enough. He tossed aboutthe sport of calms and adverse winds,-in a small trading craft that tediously voyaged across the Atlantic; and then made his way overland at even slower speed, with the primitive resources for travel then in vogue; so that the wanderer who had left Greenock in August, only reached Kingston, Upper Canada, on the last day of the year and the century. He found, as it seemed to him, an Arctic wilderness, enveloped in ice and snow; and the aspect of nature only too well accorded with the prospects that awaited him. In his weary tossings on the Atlantic, he had been well-nigh forgotten by all; and when at length he presented his credentials, it was only to learn the utter failure of his hopes. General Simcoe had been recalled in the interval. Timid councils had taken the place of his far-sighted plans. The scheme for schools and colleges was pronounced to be altogether premature. He had come without official invitation or appointment; his claims for salary were ignored; and, as he long afterwards wrote

to a friend, if he had possessed £20 he would have returned home by the next ship.

Compelled to tarry, where he had thus been invited under such delusive promises, the Hon. Richard Cartwright, through whose direct influence Mr. Strachan had been brought out, offered him a home, and the tutorship of his two sons. By and by other pupils were added; and among them the sons of the Rev. Dr. Stuart, Rector of Kingston. The rector was a characteristic specimen of the founders of the infant colony. Born in Virginia in old colonial times, and brought up with the utmost strictness in the Presbyterian communion, he had adopted the views of the Church of England, and spent the first seven years of his ministerial life as a missionary among the Iroquois, in the Mohawk River Valley. There he was engaged on a translation of the New Testament into the Indian tongue when the Revolutionary war broke out; and his Indian converts took sides in the quarrel. He at once declared himself for the Royalist party, to which the large body of the Six Nation Indians adhered; accepted a chaplaincy in a provincial regiment; and when at length peace was established, he settled among his fellow-loyalists in Canada, Rector of Kingston,and father of the Episcopal Church in Western Canada. With such a friend and counsellor it is not difficult to imagine the influences now brought to bear on the young tutor. To him is mainly ascribed the change of views which led the Scottish divinity student ere long to take orders in the Church in which he rose to the rank of bishop. He was ordained a deacon, by the Bishop of Quebec in 1803, and admitted to priest's orders in the following year. Appointed soon after to the Parish of Cornwall, he found a church had still to be built. There he fairly entered on his life-work; established a school, famous in the history of the Province, from which his pupils went forth to fill its most influential positions; and he was able in

his later years to number, with pride, Senators, Chief Justices, and official functionaries of every grade, among those he had thus trained; and at last achieved his heart's desire, when, in his old age, a loved pupil of the Cornwall Grammar School was consecrated his coadjutor in the See of Toronto. The future Bishop was a strict disciplinarian; and indeed the personal reminiscences of his biographer are rather calculated to impress the reader with an exaggerated idea of his stern rule. The boy who was to be his successor in the future bishopric, reached Cornwall on a Saturday in May, and gives this curious picture of pedagogic pomp and decorum, mingling with the more characteristic life of a Canadian village, upwards of sixty years ago. On Sunday morning he joined the gathering of boys at the schoolhouse, nearly opposite the parsonage :"Those outside maintained a very staid and respectable demeanour, standing in groups in their Sunday's best, or sauntering about within safe distance of the parsonage; whereas within, there was romping and tumbling, shouts of young voices, and clouds of dust. But the moment the principal presented himself in his flowing gown and powdered head at the door of the parsonage, there was a rush of every boy to the gate; a procession was formed and the whole school, two and two, marched to the church close by, the master following." "Black Monday" followed, with its fearful array of censors' reports, Sunday tasks and exercises, and lictors' rods. No wonder if Cornwall reproduced in plenty—

"The whining school-boy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school."

The destined co-adjutor tells us he "crept quietly in after the school had opened, and was much awed by the sights and sounds he witnessed, the sounding lash, and the shrinkings and contortions of the unfortunate ones that were made to come under it." He adds, however, that the punish

ment was not very severe. It was, in truth, no unfair premonition of the future rule in higher spheres. If the Bishop did not, in later years, employ the same rod of discipline for his clergy, he unquestionably ruled his large diocese with much the same authority as that with which he had been wont to regulate the Cornwall School. There was something in the very air with which the Bishop's old serving-man, in later years, was wont to receive a young clergyman who presented himself at the "Episcopal Palace" enough to scare any little remains of courage out of him, if he had any delinquency to atone for, or any petition to prefer. And if the usher looked grim, the aspect of the Bishop himself was little calculated to dispel the delinquent's fears. His photographs, without exception, give him the stern look which his face was apt to assume in repose! and this is even exaggerated in the engraved portrait attached to Mr. Fennings Taylor's "Last Three Bishops." But to all who knew him intiinately his expression is associated with the smile of genial humour. He retained to the last his Aberdeenshire pronunciation,-little less strange to ordinary Scottish, than to English ears; and his incisive utterances in vigorous northern Doric have left their impress on many minds. "Well, Mr. A——, I hope I may like you better when I know more of you," was the somewhat equivocal l'envoi which closed the first interview of one somewhat presuming clerical intruder. "Sit doon, sir, ye're talking perfect nonsense," was the summary arrest of another's untimely utterances, when a public audience was already manifesting unequivocal symptoms of dissatisfaction. There was no equivocation with him. No. one could ever challenge his sincerity or doubt his meaning. Yet, in reality, apart from the conscientious administration of a power as absolute and infallible as ever was. wielded under the mitre, no more genial, or kindly man ever lived. His humour was racy; his laugh free and hearty, and he