A SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
In the absence of any suitable biography of the author of “The Clockmaker,” his centenary may lend an interest to the following brief sketch of his life and times.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born at Windsor, in the Province of Nova Scotia, on the 17th day of December, 1796. He was descended from the Haliburtons of Mertoun and Newmains, a Border family, one of whom was Barbara Haliburton, only child of Thomas Haliburton, of Newmains, who married Robert Scott, and whose second son was Walter Scott, the father of the immortal Sir Walter. Her eldest son left numerous descendants. Sir Walter’s tomb is in the ancient burial place of the Haliburtons, St. Mary’s Aisle, in Dryburgh Abbey. About the beginning of the last century nearly all of her numerous uncles migrated to Jamaica, and the eldest of them, Andrew Haliburton, removed thence to Scituate, near Boston, Massachusetts, where he, and, subsequently, his son William, married members of the Otis family, to which the well-known James Otis belonged. William Haliburton (whose cousin, Major John Haliburton, Clive’s colleague, was, according to Mill’s History of India, “the Founder of the Sepoy force,”[[3]]) removed to Nova Scotia with many persons from Scituate, when the vacant lands of the Acadian French were offered to settlers. His son, the Hon. William Hersey Otis Haliburton, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, in Nova Scotia, married Lucy Grant, a daughter of Major Alexander Grant, one of Wolfe’s Highland officers at the siege of Quebec, who, after the French war, settled in the colony of New York, where he married a Miss Kent, a near relative of the famous Chancellor Kent. He was killed in the Revolutionary War, at the storming of Fort Stanwix, while in command of the New York Volunteers.
Chief Justice William Hersey Otis Haliburton left an only child, the future author of “Sam Slick,” who was educated at the Grammar School, Windsor, and afterward, at the same place, at the University of King’s College, for Tory King’s College of the Colony of New York had migrated to Windsor, Nova Scotia, where, preserving the traditions of Oxford of olden times, it remained out and out Tory in its politics, and continued unchanged, even after Oxford itself had long felt the influence of modern ideas. In its collegiate school, as late at least as 1845, that venerable heirloom, “Lilly’s Latin Grammar,” which had not a word of English from cover to cover, and which was a familiar ordeal for boys long before Shakespeare was born (Cardinal Wolsey, it is said, assisted in its composition), was still employed. It even retained the quaint old frontispiece representing boys with knee-breeches and shoebuckles (probably a picture of the original “Blue-coat Boys”) climbing up the tree of knowledge, and throwing down the golden fruit. Daily, too, at the meals in the College Hall there was, and perhaps may be to this day, heard a quaint Latin grace, which was droned by the “senior scholar,” beginning, Oculi omnium ad te spectant, Domine; probably the same that was heard in some college halls in the days of the Crusades. It is to be hoped that the “spirit of the age” has not led it to discard this and other venerable heirlooms derived from an ancient ancestry. This truly conservative and orthodox institution, in which the future author was crammed with classics, and taught to “fear God and honour the King,” was then considered one of the most successful educational institutions in America, and it still ranks high in its reputation as a college. It is the oldest in the Colonies, and it is the only one that has a Royal Charter.
Mr. Haliburton used often to puzzle his friends by saying that he and his father were born twenty miles apart, and in the same house.
The enigma throws some light on the early history of Windsor. His father had extensive grants of land at Douglas, a place situated at the head waters of the St. Croix, a tributary of the Avon, as to which there is a gruesome tablet at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the memory of a nobleman, who lost his life “from exposure during an inclement winter, while settling a band of brave Carolinians” at Douglas.