480 MEKTON COLLEGE AND CANArA. 



common schools shall learn there that he is a being who has an 

 interest in Eternity as well as in time ; that he has a Father towards 

 whom he stands in a closer, and more affecting, and more endearing 

 relationship than to any earthly father, and that that Father is in heaven; 

 that he has a hope for transcending every earthly hope — a hope full 

 of immortality — the hope, namely, that that Father's kingdom may 

 come ; that he has a duty which, like the sun in our celestial system, 

 stands in the centre of his moral obligations, shedding upon them a 

 hallowing light, which they in their turn reflect and absorb — the duty 

 of striving to prove by his life and conversation the sincerity of his 

 prayers that that Father's will may be done upon earth, as it is done 

 in heaven." 



The successor of Lord Elgin was Sir Edmund Head, who was 

 transferred from the government of New Brunswick to that of the 

 whole of British North America, in 1854. Sir Edmund Head had 

 been not only a Fellow at Merton, but also a Tutor there for several 

 years. He had associated himsAf at an early period with the advo- 

 cates of improvement in English education. Among the names of 

 the Local Committee, at Oxford, in 1833, of the famous Society for 

 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the president of which was Lord 

 Brougham, is to be seen that of " E. W. Head, Esq." This indicated 

 in Sir Edmund the possession of much moral courage. The Society 

 for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was in its day one of the best 

 abused institutions in England ; but it initiated, or rather it power- 

 fully promoted, what had already in the Providential order of things 

 been in other ways initiated, a great change in the intellectual con- 

 dition of the British nation. 



Sir Edmund Head was Lord Elgin's senior by a few years, and it 

 had curiously happened that in the examination at whieh Lord Elgin 

 won his Fellowship at Merton, Sir Edmund Head had taken part — a 

 circumstance to which Lord Elgin gracefully alluded in his farewell 

 speech at Quebec. 



As introductory to my notice of this third Merton man who has 

 been one of our rulers in Canada, I will give the passage in which 

 Lord Elgin, on this occasion, spoke of the gentleman who was about 

 to succeed him in the government. It was at an entertainment 

 given by himself at Spencer Wood, near Quebec, on the eve of his 

 final departure, in December 18o4. 



" I trust," Lord Elgin said, " that I shall hear that this house [the 

 Governor-General's residence] continues to be what I have ever sought 



