st, certain it is that
his contemporaries indignantly refused to concede his claim to them, and
that no historian has as yet admitted that claim.[133] It was
unfortunate for Sir George that he was called upon to wage war against
the United States, as his natural and excusable sympathies in favor of a
people among whom he had been born, and at least partly educated, may
have influenced his judgment without any conscious betrayal of the great
charge entrusted to him; and this remark applies with double force to
his school-fellow, Sir Roger Sheaffe, whose entire family and connexions
were American. In any case, it was hard on Sir Isaac Brock, after being
retained in Canada by Sir James Craig, when he was so anxious to serve
in the Peninsula, because that officer could not spare him, and after at
length obtaining leave to return to Europe for that purpose--it was
hard, we repeat, when hostilities did at last break out in America, that
his energies should have been so cramped by the passive attitude of his
superior. Remembering, however, the maxim, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_,
the editor has refrained from transcribing aught reflecting on the
memory of that superior when he could do so consistently with truth,
although he feels acutely that the death of Sir Isaac Brock--hastened as
he believes it was by the defensive policy and mistaken views of Sir
George Prevost--was an irreparable loss to his many brothers,[134] who
were at that period just rising into manhood, and in consequence
required all the interest for their advancement which their uncle would
probably have possessed. One especially, who closely resembled him both
in appearance and character, and who would have been an ornament to any
service, was compelled to embrace the profession of arms, for which he
had been educated, under the banners of a foreign and far distant
country. In that country, Chile, Colonel Tupper cruelly fell at the
early age of twenty-nine years; and if the reader will turn to the
memoir of this daring soldier in the Appendix, necessarily brief as it
is, he will probably agree with the British consul who wrote, that he
had "for many years looked upon his gallant and honorable conduct as
reflecting lustre upon the English name;" and he will think with the
French traveller, who, after highly eulogizing him, said: "N'est-il pas
deplorable que de tels hommes en soient reduits a se consacrer a une
cause etrangere?"

* * * *