A considerable stretch of striking landscape here skirts our route on the right. Rosedale-house, the old extra-mural home, still existent and conspicuous, of Mr. Stephen Jarvis, Registrar of the Province in the olden time, afterwards of his son the Sheriff, of both of whom we have had occasion to speak repeatedly, was always noticeable for the romantic character of its situation; on the crest of a precipitous bank overlooking deep winding ravines. Set down here while yet the forest was but little encroached on, access to it was of course for a long time, difficult and laborious.
The memorable fancy-ball given here at a comparatively late period, but during the Sheriff's lifetime, recurs as we go by. On that occasion, in the dusk of evening, and again probably in the gray dawn of morning, an irregular procession thronged the highway of Yonge Street and toiled up and down the steep approaches to Rosedale-house—a procession consisting of the simulated shapes and forms that usually revisit the glimpses of the moon at masquerades,—knights, crusaders, Plantagenet, Tudor and Stuart princes, queens and heroines; all mixed up with an incongruous ancient and modern canaille, a Tom of Bedlam, a Nicholas Bottom "with amiable cheeks and fair large ears," an Ariel, a Paul Pry, a Pickwick, &c., &c., not pacing on with some veri-similitude on foot or respectably mounted on horse, ass, or mule, but borne along most prosaically on wheels or in sleighs.
This pageant, though only a momentary social relaxation, a transient but still not unutilitarian freak of fashion, accomplished well and cleverly in the midst of a scene literally a savage wild only a few years previously, may be noted as one of the many outcomes of precocity characterizing society in the colonies of England.
In a burlesque drama to be seen in the columns of a contemporary paper (the Colonist, of 1839) we have an allusion to this memorable entertainment. The news is supposed to have just arrived of the union of the Canadas, to the dismay, as it is pretended, of the official party, among whom there will henceforth be no more cakes and ale. A messenger, Thomas, speaks:
List, oh, list—the Queen hath sent A message to her Lords and trusty Commons— All—What message sent she? Thomas.—Oh the dreadful news! That both the Canadas in one be joined.—(faints.)
Sheriff William then speaks:
Farewell ye masquerades, ye sparkling routs: Now routed out, no more shall routs be ours; No gilded chariots now shall roll along; No sleighs that sweep across our icy path,— Sleighs! no: this news that slays our warmest hopes, Ends pageantry, and pride and masquerades.
The characters in the dramatic jeu d'esprit, from which these lines are taken, are the principal personages of the defeated party, under thinly disguised names, Mr. Justice Clearhead, Mr. John Scott, William Welland, Judge Brock, Christopher, Samuel, Sheriff William, as above, and Thomas, &c. Rosedale is a name of pleasant sound. We are reminded thereby of another of the same genus, but of more recent application in these parts—Hazeldean—the pretty title given by Chief Justice Draper to his rural cottage, which overhangs and looks down upon the same ravine as Rosedale, but on the opposite side. (A residence of the Earl of Shaftesbury in Kew-foot Lane near Richmond, on the Thames is called Rosedale House, and is associated with the memory of the poet Thomson, who is said to have written his Castle of Indolence there.)
The perils and horrors encountered every spring and autumn by travellers and others in their ascent and descent of the precipitous sides of the Rosedale ravine, at the point where the primitive Yonge Street crossed it, were a local proverb and by-word: perils and horrors ranking for enormity with those associated with the passage of the Rouge, the Credit, the Sixteen, and a long list of other deeply ploughed watercourses intersected of necessity by the two great highways of Upper Canada.
The ascent and descent of the gorge were here spoken of collectively as the "Blue Hill." Certain strata of a bluish clay had been remarked at the summit on both sides. The waggon-track passed down and up by two long wearisome and difficult slopes cut in the soil of the steep sides of the lofty banks. After the autumnal rains and during the thaws at the close of winter, the condition of the route here was indescribably bad. At the period referred to, however, the same thing, for many a year, was to be said of every rood of Yonge Street throughout its thirty miles of length.