Toronto of Old Part 5

We next arrived at a large open s.p.a.ce, much broken up by a rivulet--"Russell's Creek,"--that meandered most recklessly through it.

This piece of ground was long known as Simcoe Place, and was set apart in the later plan for the extension of York westward, as a Public Square. Overlooking this area from the north-west, at the present day, is one of the elms of the original forest--an unnoticeable sapling at the period referred to, but now a tree of stately dimensions and of very graceful form, resembling that of the Greek letter Psi. It will be a matter of regret when the necessities of the case shall render the removal of this relic indispensable.

At the corner to the south of this conspicuous tree, was an inn long known as the Greenland Fishery. Its sign bore on one side, quite pa.s.sably done, an Arctic or Greenland scene; and on the other, vessels and boats engaged in the capture of the whale. A travelling sailor, familiar with whalers, and additionally a man of some artistic taste and skill, paid his reckoning in labour, by executing for the landlord, Mr.

Wright, these spirited paintings, which proved an attraction to the house.

John Street, which pa.s.ses north, by the Greenland Fishery, bears one of the Christian names of the first Governor of Upper Canada. Graves Street, on the east side of the adjoining Square, bore his second Christian name; but Graves Street has, in recent times, been transformed into Simcoe Street.

When the Houses of Parliament, now to be seen stretching across Simcoe Place, were first built, a part of the design was a central pediment supported by four stone columns. This would have relieved and given dignity to the long front. The stone platform before the princ.i.p.al entrance was constructed with a flight of steps leading thereto; but the rather graceful portico which it was intended to sustain, was never added. The monoliths for the pillars were duly cut out at a quarry near Hamilton. They long remained lying there, in an unfinished state. In the lithographic view of the Parliament Buildings, published by J. Young, their architect, in 1836, the pediment of the original design is given as though it existed.

Along the edge of the water, below the properties, s.p.a.ces and objects which we have been engaged in noticing, once ran a s.h.i.+ngly beach of a width sufficient to admit of the pa.s.sage of vehicles. A succession of dry seasons must then have kept the waters low. In 1815, however, the waters of the Lake appear to have been unusually high. An almanac of that year, published by John Cameron, at York, offers, seriously as it would seem, the subjoined explanation of the phenomenon: "The comet which pa.s.sed to the northward three years since," the writer suggests, "has sensibly affected our seasons: they have become colder; the snows fall deeper; and from lesser exhalation, and other causes, the Lakes rise much higher than usual."

The Commissariat store-houses were situated here, just beyond the broken ground of Simcoe Place; long white structures of wood, with the shutters of the windows always closed; built on a level with the bay, yet having an entrance in the rear by a narrow gangway from the cliff above, on which, close by, was the guard-house, a small building, painted of a dun colour, with a roof of one slope, inclining to the south, and an arched stoup or verandah open to the north. Here a sentry was ever to be seen, pacing up and down. A light bridge over a deep water-course led up to the guard-house.

Over other depressions or ravines, close by here, were long to be seen some platforms or floored areas of stout plank. These were said to be s.p.a.ces occupied by different portions of the renowned canvas-house of the first Governor, a structure manufactured in London and imported.

The convenience of its plan, and the hospitality for which it afforded room, were favourite topics among the early people of the country. We have it in Bouchette's _British North America_ a reference to this famous canvas house. "In the spring (_i. e._ of 1793)," that writer says, "the Lieutenant-Governor moved to the site of the new capital (York), attended by the regiment of the Queen's Rangers, and commenced at once the realization of his favourite project. His Excellency inhabited, during the summer, and through the winter, a canvas-house, which he imported expressly for the occasion; but, frail as was its substance, it was rendered exceedingly comfortable, and soon became as distinguished for the social and urbane hospitality of its venerable and gracious host, as for the peculiarity of its structure," vol. i. 80.

After this allusion to the home Canadian life of the first Governor, the following remarks of de Liancourt, on the same subject, will not appear out of place:--"In his private life," the Duke says, "Gov. Simcoe is simple, plain and obliging. He inhabits [the reference now is to Newark or Niagara] a small, miserable wooden house, which formerly was occupied by the Commissaries, who resided here on account of the navigation of the Lake. His guard consist of four soldiers, who every morning come from the fort [across the river], and return thither in the evening. He lives in a n.o.ble and hospitable manner, without pride; his mind is enlightened, his character mild and obliging; he discourses with much good sense on all subjects; but his favourite topics are his projects, and war, which seem to be the objects of his leading pa.s.sions. He is acquainted with the military history of all countries: no hillock catches his eye without exciting in his mind the idea of a fort which might be constructed on the spot; and with the construction of this fort he a.s.sociates the plan of operations for a campaign, especially of that which is to lead him to Philadelphia. [Gen. Simcoe appears to have been strongly of the opinion that the United States were not going to be a permanency.] On hearing his professions of an earnest desire of peace, you cannot but suppose, either that his reason must hold an absolute sway over his pa.s.sion, or that he deceives himself." _Travels_, i. 241.

Other traits, which doubtless at this time gave a charm to the home-life of the accomplished Governor, may be gathered from a pa.s.sage in the correspondence, at a later period, of Polwhele, the historian of Cornwall, who says, in a letter addressed to the General himself, dated Manaccan, Nov. 5th, 1803:--"I have been sorely disappointed, once or twice, in missing you, whilst you were inspecting Cornwall. It was not long after your visit at my friend Mr. Hoblyn's, but I slept also at Nanswhydden. Had I met you there, the _Noctes Atticae_, the _Coenae Deorum_, would have been renewed, if peradventure the chess-board intervened not; for rooks and p.a.w.ns, I think, would have frightened away the Muses, familiar as rooks and p.a.w.ns might have been to the suitors of Penelope." _Polwhele_, 544.

The canvas-house above spoken of, had been the property of Capt. Cook the circ.u.mnavigator. On its being offered for sale in London, Gov.

Simcoe, seeing its possible usefulness to himself as a moveable government-house purchased it.

Some way to the east of the Commissariat store-houses was the site of the Naval Building Yard, where an unfinished s.h.i.+p-of-war and the materials collected for the construction of others, were destroyed, when the United States forces took possession of York in 1813.

It appears that Col. Joseph Bouchette had just been pointing out to the Government the exposed condition of the public property here. In a note at p. 89 of his _British North America_ that officer remarks: "The defenceless situation of York, the mode of its capture, and the destruction of the large s.h.i.+p then on the stocks, were but too prophetically demonstrated in my report to headquarters in Lower Canada, on my return from a responsible mission to the capital of the Upper Province, in the early part of April. Indeed the communication of the result of my reconnoitering operations, and the intelligence of the successful invasion of York, and the firing of the new s.h.i.+p by the enemy, were received almost simultaneously."

The Governor-in-Chief, Sir George Prevost, was blamed for having permitted a frigate to be laid down in an unprotected position. There was a "striking impropriety," as the Third Letter of _Veritas_, a celebrated correspondent of the Montreal _Herald_ in 1815, points out, "in building at York, without providing the means of security there, as the works of defence, projected by General Brock, (when he contemplated, before the war, the removal of the naval depot from Kingston to York, by reason of the proximity of the former to the States in water by the ice), were discontinued by orders from below, [from Sir George Prevost, that is], and never resumed. The position intended to have been fortified by General Brock, near York, was," _Veritas_ continues, "capable of being made very strong, had his plan been executed; but as it was not, nor any other plan of defence adopted, a s.h.i.+p-yard without protection became an allurement to the enemy, as was felt to the cost of the inhabitants of York."

In the year 1832, the interior of the Commissariat-store, decorated with flags, was the scene of the first charitable bazaar held in these parts.

It was for the relief of distress occasioned by a recent visitation of cholera. The enterprise appears to have been remarkably successful. We have a notice of it in Sibbald's _Canadian Magazine_ of January, 1833, in the following terms: "All the fas.h.i.+onable and well-disposed attended; the band of the gallant 79th played, at each table stood a lady; and in a very short time all the articles were sold to gentlemen,--who will keep 'as the apple of their eye' the things made and presented by such hands." The sum collected on the occasion, it is added, was three hundred and eleven pounds.

Where Windsor Street now appears--with its grand iron gates at either end, inviting or forbidding the entrance of the stranger to the prim, quaint, self-contained little village of villas inside--formerly stood the abode of Mr. John Beikie, whose tall, upright, staidly-moving form, generally enveloped in a long snuff-coloured overcoat, was one of the _dramatis personae_ of York. He had been, at an early period, sheriff of the Home District; at a later time his signature was familiar to every eye, attached in the _Gazette_ to notices put forth by the Executive Council of the day, of which rather aristocratic body he was the Clerk.

Pa.s.sing westward, we had on the right the s.p.a.cious home of Mr.

Crookshank, a benevolent and excellent man, sometime Receiver-General of the Province, of whom we shall again have occasion to speak; and on the left, on a promontory suddenly jutting out into the harbour, "Captain Bonnycastle's cottage," with garden and picturesque grove attached; all Ordnance property in reality, and once occupied by Col. Coffin. The whole has now been literally eaten away by the ruthless tooth of the steam excavator. On the beach to the west of this promontory was a much frequented bathing-place. Captain Bonnycastle, just named, was afterwards Sir Richard, and the author of "Canada as it was, is, and may be," and "Canada and the Canadians in 1846."

The name "Peter," attached to the street which flanks on the west the ancient homestead and extensive outbuildings of Mr. Crookshank, is a memento of the president or administrator, Peter Russell. It led directly up to Petersfield, Mr. Russell's park lot on Queen Street.

We come here to the western boundary of the so-called New Town--the limit of the first important extension of York westward. The limit, eastward, of the New Town, was a thoroughfare known in the former day as Toronto Street, which was one street east of Yonge Street, represented now by Victoria Street. At the period when the plan was designed for this grand western and north-western suburb of York, Yonge Street was not opened southward farther than Lot [Queen] Street. The roadway there suddenly veered to the eastward, and then, after a short interval, pa.s.sed down Toronto Street, a roadway a little to the west of the existing Victoria Street.

The tradition in Boston used to be, that some of the streets there followed the line of accidental cow-paths formed in the olden time in the uncleared bush; and no doubt other old American towns, like ancient European towns generally, exhibit, in the direction of their thoroughfares, occasionally, traces of casual circ.u.mstances in the history of the first settlers on their respective sites. The practice at later periods has been to make all ways run as nearly as possible in right lines. In one or two "jogs" or irregularities, observable in the streets of the Toronto of to-day, we have memorials of early waggon tracks which ran where they most conveniently could. The slight meandering of Front Street in its course from the garrison to the site of the first Parliament Buildings, and of Britain Street, (an obscure pa.s.sage between George Street and Caroline Street), may be thus explained; as also the fact that the southern end of the present Victoria Street does not connect immediately with the present Toronto Street. This last-mentioned irregularity is a relic of the time when the great road from the north, namely, Yonge Street, on reaching Queen Street, slanted off to the eastward across vacant lots and open ground, making by the nearest and most convenient route for the market and the heart of the town.

After the laying-out in lots of the region comprehended in the first great expansion of York, of which we have spoken, inquiries were inst.i.tuted by the authorities as to the improvements made by the holders of each. In the chart accompanying the report of Mr. Stegman, the surveyor appointed to make the examination, the lots are coloured according to the condition of each, and appended are the following curious particulars, which smack somewhat of the ever-memorable town-plot of Eden, to which Martin Chuzzlewit was induced to repair, and which offered a lively picture of an infant metropolis in the rough. (We must represent to ourselves a chequered diagram; some of the squares white or blank; some tinted blue; some shaded black; the whole ent.i.tled "Sketch of the Part of the Town of York west of Toronto Street.")--"Explanation: The blank lots are cleared, agreeable to the notice issued from His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor, bearing date September the fourth, 1800. The lots shaded blue are chiefly cut, but the brush not burnt; and those marked with the letter A, the brush only cut. The lots shaded black, no work done. The survey made by order of the Surveyor-General's office, bearing date April the 23rd, 1801." A more precise examination appears to have been demanded. The explanations appended to the second plan, which has squares shaded brown, in addition to those coloured blue and black, are: "1st. The blank lots are cleared.

2nd. The lots shaded black, _no work done_. 3rd. The lots shaded brown, _the brush cut and burnt_. 4th. The lots shaded blue, _the brush cut and not burnt_. N.B. The lots 1 and 2 on the north side of Newgate Street [the site subsequently of the dwelling-house of Jesse Ketchum, of whom hereafter], are mostly clear of the large timber, and some _brush cut_ also, but _not burnt_; therefore omitted in the first report. This second examination done by order of the Honourable John Elmsley, Esq."

The second extension of York westward included the Government Common.

The staking out of streets here was a comparatively late event. Brock Street, to which we have now approached, had its name, of course, from the General officer slain at Queenston, and its extra width from the example set in the Avenue to the north, into which it merges after crossing Queen Street.

A little to the west of Brock Street was the old military burying-ground, a clearing in the thick brushwood of the locality: of an oblong shape, its four picketed sides directed exactly towards the four cardinal points. The setting off of the neighbouring streets and lots at a different angle, caused the boundary lines of this plot to run askew to every other straight line in the vicinity. Over how many a now forgotten and even obliterated grave have the customary farewell volleys here been fired!--those final honours to the soldier, always so touching; intended doubtless, in the old barbaric way, to be an incentive to endurance in the sound and well; and consolatory in antic.i.p.ation to the sick and dying.

In the mould of this old cemetery, what a mingling from distant quarters! Hearts finally at rest here, fluttered in their last beats, far away, at times, to old familiar scenes "beloved in vain" long ago; to villages, hedgerows, lanes, fields, in green England and Ireland, in rugged Scotland and Wales. Many a widow, standing at an open grave here, holding the hand of orphan boy or girl, has "wept her soldier dead," not slain in the battle-field, indeed, but fallen, nevertheless, in the discharge of duty, before one or other of the subtle a.s.sailants that, even in times of peace, not unfrequently bring the career of the military man to a premature close. Among the remains deposited in this ancient burial-plot are those of a child of the first Governor of Upper Canada, a fact commemorated on the exterior of the mortuary chapel over his own grave in Devons.h.i.+re, by a tablet on which are the words: "Katharine, born in Upper Canada, 16th Jan., 1793; died and was buried at York Town, in that Province, in 1794."

Close to the military burial-ground was once enacted a scene which might have occurred at the obsequies of a Tartar chief in the days of old.

Capt. Battersby, sent out to take command of a Provincial corps, was the owner of several fine horses, to which he was greatly attached. On his being ordered home, after the war of 1812, friends and others began to make offers for the purchase of the animals; but no; he would enter into no treaty with any one on that score. What his decision was became apparent the day before his departure from York. He then had his poor dumb favourites led out by some soldiers to the vicinity of the burying-ground; and there he caused each of them to be deliberately shot dead. He did not care to entrust to the tender mercies of strangers, in the future, those faithful creatures that had served him so well, and had borne him whithersoever he listed, so willingly and bravely. The carca.s.ses were interred on the spot where the shooting had taken place.

Returning now again to Brock Street, and placing ourselves at the middle point of its great width--immediately before us to the north, on the ridge which bounds the view in the distance, we discern a white object.

This is Spadina House, from which the avenue into which Brock Street pa.s.ses, takes its name. The word Spadina itself is an Indian term tastefully modified, descriptive of a sudden rise of land like that on which the house in the distance stands. Spadina was the residence of Dr.

W. W. Baldwin, to whom reference has already been made. A liberal in his political views, he nevertheless was strongly influenced by the feudal feeling which was a second nature with most persons in the British Islands some years ago. His purpose was to establish in Canada a family, whose head was to be maintained in opulence by the proceeds of an entailed estate. There was to be forever a Baldwin of Spadina.

It is singular that the first inheritor of the newly-established patrimony should have been the statesman whose lot it was to carry through the Legislature of Canada the abolition of the rights of primogeniture. The son grasped more readily than the father what the genius of the North American continent will endure, and what it will not.

Spadina Avenue was laid out by Dr. Baldwin on a scale that would have satisfied the designers of St. Petersburg or Was.h.i.+ngton. Its width is one hundred and twenty feet. Its length from the water's edge to the base of Spadina Hill would be nearly three miles. Garnished on both sides by a double row of full grown chestnut trees, it would vie in magnificence, when seen from an eminence, with the Long Walk at Windsor.

Eastward of Spadina House, on the same elevation of land, was Davenport, the picturesque and chateau-like home of Col. Wells, formerly of the 43rd regiment, built at an early period. Col. Wells was a fine example of the English officer, whom we so often see retiring from the camp gracefully and happily into domestic life. A faithful portrait of him exists, in which he wears the gold medal of Badajoz. His sons, natural artists, and arbiters of taste, inherited, along with their aesthetic gifts, also lithe and handsome persons. One of them, now, like his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the army, was highly distinguished in the Crimea; and on revisiting Toronto after the peace with 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 fine. (On his retirement from the army, the second Col. Wells took up his abode at Davenport.)

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 filled a judicial position in the West Indies.

In Canada, he was successively Attorney-General and Vice-Chancellor, the Chancellors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociate 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 rills, 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 wills: One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted, That, wisely doating, asked not why it doated, And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.

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 can 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. 'Though seas between us broad ha' roll'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, auth.o.r.ess of the 'Diary of an Ennuyee,' 'Loves of the Poets,'

and other agreeable productions."

Mr. Jameson was a man of high culture and fine literary tastes. He was, moreover, 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 const.i.tute 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 on 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 pa.s.s down the rapids at the Sault, she had been formally named by the Otchipways of the locality, _Was-sa-je-wun-e-qua_, "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 exhibiting the mangled reputations of her friends:" a censure, she adds, which is just, but the propensity, 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 female acquaintance commenting with a spiteful or a sprightly levity on the delinquencies and mistakes of their s.e.x, I have only said to myself, 'They know not what they do.'" "Here, then," the Preface referred to concludes, "I present to women a little elementary manual or introduction to that knowledge of woman, in which they may learn to understand better their own nature; to judge more justly, more gently, more truly of each other;

'And in the silent hour of inward thought To still _suspect_, yet still _revere_ themselves In lowliness of heart.'"

Mrs. Jameson was unattractive in person at first sight, although, as could scarcely fail to be the case in one so highly endowed, her features, separately considered, were fine and boldly marked.

Intellectually, she was an enchantress. Besides an originality and independence of judgment on most subjects, and a facility in generalizing and reducing thought to the form of a neat aphorism, she had a strong and capacious memory, richly furnished with choice things.

Her conversation was consequently of the most fascinating kind.

She sang, too, in sweet taste, with a quiet softness, without display.