FOOTNOTES:
[96] See his "Narrative of Occurrences in Upper Canada," written from Bath to the Secretary of State for the Colonial Department, dated 5th December, 1828, and included in pp. 273-288 of the blue book on the subject issued by the Imperial Government in 1829.
[97] There is a covert irony in the portion of Judge Willis's Narrative which refers to this subject. "I wished to think," he writes, "and from the attention he seemed to pay to business I actually worked myself up into the belief, which I frequently expressed, that Mr. Justice Sherwood was a hard-headed sensible man; but I became convinced that, though right in the former conjecture, yet so far as legal knowledge or abilities were concerned, I was mistaken in the latter part of my conclusion." The italics are Judge Willis's own.
[98] See Judge Willis's Narrative, ubi supra.
[99] So far as mere diction is concerned I have here chiefly followed Collins's own report of this episode, as published in the Freeman, but I have also before me the Attorney-General's account, as well as the more elaborate one of Judge Willis himself, and the three do not materially differ in this respect.
[100] Ante, p. 13.
[101] The Freeman, April 17th, 1828.
[102] The case, as put by the Judge, was purely hypothetical. "If the Attorney-General has acted so and so, he has neglected his duty." See ante, p. 174.
[103] The announcement ran as follows:—"Preparing for publication.—A View of the Present System of Jurisprudence in Upper Canada; by an English Barrister, now one of His Majesty's Judges in this Province.—Meliora sperans."
[104] It was time for some one to undertake the duty of ameliorating the criminal law of Upper Canada, which was that of England as it stood on the 17th of September, 1792, except in so far as it had been altered by subsequent legislation. At the Assizes for the Home District, held at York in the autumn of 1827, within a few weeks after Judge Willis's arrival in the Province, a boy was capitally convicted and sentenced to death for killing a cow.