CANADIAN NOMS-DE-PLUME IDENTIFIED. 335 



tions ordered by Sir George Prevost). I addressed notes to several 

 gentlemen who had interested themselves in early Canadian history, 

 but without result. Amongst them, especially, I applied to Col. 

 Coffin, above-named, but after inquiry instituted, he could afford me 

 no help. Inquiries were also made for me of the present propi'ietors 

 and publishers of the Montreal Herald. I thought that possibly 

 among the traditions of the office of that paper the name of its now 

 historical contributor might be preserved. Mr. Penny, the present 

 editor of the Herald, kindly endeavoured to get the desired infor- 

 mation from Mr. Archibald Ferguson, a gentleman now aged more 

 than ninety years, formerly proprietor of Herald. Mr. Ferguson's 

 reply, however, now lying before me, was as follows : — " In answer 

 to your note of the 17th instant, I beg to inform you that I do not 

 know who wrote the articles signed Veritas and Nerva, in 1815.. 

 They were published nine years before I purchased the Herald 

 establishment, and the two former proprietors were dead before I 

 purchased." (I had coupled my query about Veritas with one about 

 a writer styling himself Nerva, also in the Herald ; but Nerva I 

 discovered afterwards by accident, while looking through the articles 

 in Mr. Morgan's Bihliotheca Canadensis.) How I came at length to 

 recover the all but totally forgotten authorship of the Veritas letters,. 

 I will detail concisely after I have given a sample or two of the pro- 

 ductions themselves. I add the reflection : if in so short a period an 

 uncertainty so decided could spring up in regard to writings whose 

 authorship was probably notorious to contemporaries, how easy it 

 must have been, in the days when printing was unknown, and when 

 of many an important record no duplicate existed, for ambiguities to 

 arise on such points ; how easy it must have been, at the dictate of 

 policy or ambition, to falsify and substitute, with small chance of 

 explicit detection at the hands of posterity. 



Veritas, throughout his letters, inveighs against Sir George Prevost 

 for an apparent lack of energy, decision, and dash. But we must 

 bear in mind what Auchinleck has said, as quoted just now, that Sir 

 George was probably under restraint from the instructions which he 

 had received from the Ministry at home, who had no relish for the 

 contest in which they found themselves engaged. " Towards spring, 

 1814, so inveterate," Veritas says, " was Sir George's rage for armis- 

 tices, notwithstanding the injurious. consequences of the former to- 

 the military service, that a negotiation for another was set on foot, 



