166 CANADIAN LOCAL HISTORX". 



Russia, was publicly presented with, a sword of honour. — The view of the Lake and intervening 

 forest, as seen from Davenport and Spadina, before the cultivation of the alluvial plain below, 

 was always ilne. 



III.— FROM BROCK STREET TO THE OLD FRENCH FORT, 



Returning again to the front. The portion of the Common that lies immediately west of the 

 foot of Brock Street was enclosed for the first time and ornamentally planted by Mr. Jameson. 

 Before his removal to Canada, Mr. Jameson had flUed a judicial situation in the West Indies. 

 In Canada, he was successively Attorney-General and "Vice-Chancellor, the Chancellorship itself 

 being vested in the Crown. The conversational powers of Mr. Jameson were admirable ; and 

 no slight interest attached to the pleasant talk of one who, in his younger days, had been the 

 familiar associate of Southey, Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a volume of 

 poems by Hartley Coleridge, son of the philosopher, published in 1833, the three sonnets 

 addressed "To a Friend," were addressed to Mr. Jameson, as we are informed in a note. We 

 give the first of these little poems at length : 



"When we were idlers with the loitering riUs, 

 The need of human love'we little noted : 

 Our love was nature ; and the peace that floated 

 On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills. 

 To sweet accord subdued our wayward wUls : 

 One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted. 

 That, wisely doating, asked not why it doated. 

 And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kiUs. 

 But now I find how dear thou wert to me ; 

 That man is more than half of nature's treasure. 

 Of that fair Beauty which no eye ean see. 

 Of that sweet music which no ear can measure ; 

 And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure, 

 The hills sleep on in their eternity. " 



The note appended, which appears only in the first edition, is as follows : "This sonnet, and 

 the two following, my earliest attempts at that form of versification, were addressed to R. S. 

 Jameson, Esq., on occasion of meeting him in London, after a separation of some years. He 

 was the favourite companion of my boyhood, the active friend and sincere counsellor of my 

 youth — 'Tliough seas between us broad ha' roU'd' since we 'travelled side by side' last, I 

 trust the sight of this little volume will give rise to recollections that will make him ten years 

 younger. He is now Judge Advocate at Dominica, and husband of Mrs. Jameson, authoress of 

 the 'Diary of an Ennuyee,' 'Loves of the Poets,' and other agreeable productions." Mr. Jame- 

 son was a man of high culture and fine literaiy tastes. He was, moi-eover, an amateur artist of 

 no ordinary skill, as extant drawings of his in water-colours attest. His countenance, especially 

 in his old age, was of the Jeremy Bentham stamp. It was from the house on the west of Brock 

 Street that Mrs. Jameson dated the letters which constituted her well-known "Winter Studies 

 and Summer Rambles." That volume thus closes: " At three o'clock in the morning, just as 

 the moon was setting in Lake Ontario, I arrived at the door of my own house in Toronto, having 

 been absent on this wild expedition [to the Sault] just two months." York had then been two 

 years Toronto. (For having ventured to pass do'ivn the rapids at the Sault, she had been for. 

 mally named by the Otchipways of the locality, Was-sa-je-ivun-e-qica, "Woman of the Bright 

 Stream.") The Preface to the American edition of Mrs. Jameson's "Characteristics of Women" 

 was also written here. In that Introduction we can detect a touch due to the "wild expedition " 

 just spoken of. " They say," she observes, "that as a savage proves his heroism by displaying 

 in grim array the torn scalps of his enemies, so a woman thinks she proves her virtue by exhibit- 

 ing the mangled reputations of her friends " : a censure, she adds, which is just : but the pro- 

 pensity, she explains, is wrongly attributed to ill-nature and jealousy. "Ignorance," she 

 proceeds, "is the main cause ; ignorance of ourselves and others ; and when I have heard any 



