The spectator, on looking up and recognizing the presence of the Chief Justice thus seated, involuntarily imagined himself, for the moment, to be in court. In truth, in an absent moment, the Judge himself might experience some confusion as to his whereabouts. For below him, on his right and left, he would see many of the barristers, attorneys, jurors and witnesses (to go no farther), who on week days were to be seen or heard before him in different compartments of the Court-room.
Chief Justice Powell was of Welsh descent. The name is, of course, Ap Howell; of which "Caer Howell," "Howell's Place," the title given by the Chief Justice to his Park-lot at York, is a relic. His portrait exists in Toronto, in possession of members of his family. He was a man of rather less than the ordinary stature. His features were round in outline, unmarked by the painful lines which usually furrow the modern judicial visage, but wakefully intelligent. His hair was milky white. The head was inclined to be bald.
We have before us a contemporary brochure of the Chief's, from which we learn his view of the ecclesiastical land question, which for so long a period agitated Canada. After a full historical discussion, he recommends the re-investment of the property in the Crown, "which," he says, "in its bounty, will apply the proceeds equally for the support of Christianity, without other distinction:" but he comes to this determination reluctantly, and considers the plan to be one of expediency only. We give the concluding paragraph of his pamphlet, for the sake of its ring—so characteristically that of a by-gone day and generation: "If the wise provision of Mr. Pitt," the writer says, "to preserve the Law of the Union [between England and Scotland], by preserving the Church of England predominant in the Colony, and touching upon her rights to tythes only for her own advantage, and by the same course as the Church itself desiderates in England (the exchange of tythes for the fee simple), must be abandoned to the sudden thought of a youthful speculator [i. e., Mr. Wilmot, Secretary for the Colonies, who had introduced a bill into the Imperial Parliament for the sale of the Lands to the Canada Company], let the provision of his bill cease, and the tythes to which the Church of England was at that time lawfully entitled be restored; she will enjoy these exclusively even of the Kirk of Scotland: but if all veneration for the wisdom of our Ancestors has ceased, and the time is come to prostrate the Church of England, bind her not up in the same wythe with her bitterest enemy; force her not to an exclusive association with any one of her rivals; leave the tythes abolished; abolish all the legal exchange for them; and restore the Reserves to the Crown, which, in its bounty, will apply the proceeds equally for the support of Christianity, without other distinction."
In the body of the Church, below, sat another Chief Justice, retired from public life, and infirm—Mr. Scott—the immediate predecessor of Chief Justice Powell; a white-haired, venerable form, assisted to his place, a little to the south of the Governor's pew, every Sunday. We have already once before referred to Mr. Scott.
And again: another judicial personage was here every week long to be seen, also crowned with the snowy honours of advanced age—Mr. Justice Campbell—afterwards, in succession to Chief Justice Powell, Chief Justice Sir William Campbell. His place was on the west side of the central aisle. Sir William Campbell was born so far back as 1758. He came out from Scotland as a soldier in a Highland regiment, and was taken prisoner at Yorktown when that place was surrendered by Cornwallis in 1781. In 1783 he settled in Nova Scotia and studied law. After practising as a barrister for nineteen years he was appointed Attorney-General for the Island of Cape Breton, from which post, after twelve years, he was promoted to a Judgeship in Upper Canada. This was in 1811. Fourteen years afterwards (in 1825), he became Chief Justice.
The funeral of Sir William Campbell, in 1834, was one of unusual impressiveness. The Legislature was in session at the time, and attended in a body, with the Bar and the Judges. At the same hour, within the walls of the same Church, St. James', the obsequies of a member of the Lower House took place, namely, of Mr. Roswell Mount, representative of the County of Middlesex, who had chanced to die at York during the session.
A funeral oration on the two-fold occasion was pronounced by Archdeacon Strachan.—Dr. Henry, author of "Trifles from my Portfolio," attended Sir William Campbell in his last illness. In the work just named, his case is thus described: "My worthy patient became very weak towards the end of the year," the doctor says, "his nights were restless—his appetite began to fail, and he could only relish tit bits. Medicine was tried fruitlessly, so his doctor prescribed snipes. At the point of the sandy peninsula opposite the barracks," Dr. Henry continues, "are a number of little pools and marshes, frequented by these delectable little birds; and here I used to cross over in my skiff and pick up the Chief Justice's panacea. On this delicate food the poor old gentleman was supported for a couple of months; but the frost set in—the snipes flew away, and Sir William died." (ii. 112.)
Appended to the account of the funeral ceremonies, in the York Courier of the day, we notice one of those familiar paragraphs which sensational itemists like to construct, and which stimulate the self-complacency of small communities. It is headed Longevity, and then thus proceeds: "At the funeral of the late Sir W. Campbell, on Monday, there were twenty inhabitants of York, whose united ages exceed fourteen hundred and fifty years!"
It is certain that there were to be seen moving up the aisles of the old wooden St. James', at York, every Sunday, a striking number of venerable and dignified forms. For one thing their costume helped to render them picturesque and interesting. The person of our immediate ancestors was well set off by their dress. Recall their easy, partially cut-away black coats and upright collars; their so-called small-clothes and buckled shoes; the frilled shirt-bosoms and the white cravats, not apologies for cravats, but real envelopes for the neck. (The comfortable, well-to-do Quaker of the old school still exhibits in use some of their homely peculiarities of garb.) And then remember the cut and arrangement of their hair, generally milky white, either from age or by the aid of powder; their smoothly-shaven cheek and chin; and the peculiar expression superinduced in the eye and the whole countenance, by the governing ideas of the period, ideas which we are wont to style old-fashioned, but which furnished, nevertheless, for the time being, very useful and definite rules of conduct.
Two pictures, one, Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence; the other, Huntingdon's Republican Court of Washington (shewn in Paris in 1867), exhibit to the eye the outward and visible presentment of the prominent actors in the affairs of the central portion of the Northern Continent, a century ago. These paintings may help to do the same, in some degree, for us here in the north, also; any one of the more conspicuous figures in the congregation of the old St. James's, at York, might have stepped out from the canvas of one or other of the historic works of art just named. On occasions of state, even the silken bag (in the case of officials at least) was attached to the nape of the neck, as though, in accordance with a fashion of an earlier day still, the hair were yet worn long, and required gathering up in a receptacle provided for the purpose.