in the army, and a judge had experienced some of the benefits
derivable from a constitution, the very transcript and image of that of
Great Britain, managed by a General of Division and a clique of
placemen. The clique were, on the whole, men of genteel education and
refined tastes. They formed an exclusive circle of associates. Officers
of the army, on full pay, were admitted to the society of their wives
and daughters, and no one else but one of themselves, and indeed the
gentry of the country consisted of the Governor, the Bishop, a Chief
Justice, the Clerk of the Executive Council, a few of the leading
merchants, who were members of the Legislative Council, or who were the
descendants of an Executive Councillor, or of an Aid-de-Camp, the
Colonels of Engineers and Artillery, with such of the other officers of
these corps who cared for the society of an honorable possessor of
waste lands or Timber Broker, and the officers of the regiments of the
line. In the principal towns the clergy of the Church of Scotland were
sometimes looked upon as gentlemen. Elsewhere, in common with the
clergy of dissenting congregations, they were only on a footing with
those many respectable people who cultivated farms, kept shops, or
owned steamboats. The banker had not even yet reached that scale of
importance which would have entitled him to be considered one of the
gentry. Among Governors, Bishops, Chief Justices, Clerks of Council,
and officers of the army, it would have been wonderful had there not
been men of literary tastes. These tastes did prevail and required
gratification. In Lower Canada, it was suggested to Lord Dalhousie that
it would do him honor were he to be the founder of a Literary and
Historical Society. Lord Dalhousie--who was a really excellent
man--although a blundering governor in Lower Canada, where he had such
men as Neilson, Stuart, Papineau and even the supple Vallieres to
thwart him--and anxious to benefit the colony as much as he could at
once took the hint. He founded it in Quebec, and became its patron. It
was founded for the purpose of investigating points of history,
immediately connected with the Canadas; to discover and rescue from the
unsparing hand of time the records which remained of the earliest
history of New France; to preserve such documents as might be found
amid the dust of unexplored depositories, and which might prove
important to general history and to the particular history of the
province