About 1870 the same point was raised at Montreal in the famous “Guibord case.” The members of a French-Canadian literary society, which had refused to have standard scientific works weeded out of its library, were excommunicated. One of them, named Guibord, had bought and was the legal owner of a lot in the public cemetery at Montreal, and, when he died, his body was refused admission to it. Though this proceeding was justified by the Quebec courts, their judgments were reversed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; and upon the defendants refusing to obey “the order of Her Majesty in Council in the matter,” some thousands of troops were called out, and the body, under military protection, was buried under several feet of Portland cement in the Guibord lot.

While the ruling in Carten vs. Walsh et al. created some bitter enemies that were powerful enough to make their hostility felt, some offence (perhaps not altogether without apparent cause) may also have been taken by them at a few incidental philosophical allusions in “Rule and Misrule of the English in America” to the important results that were likely to flow from the new rôle of the Roman Catholic Church as a political power in the New World, a subject that he would no doubt have prudently avoided could he have foreseen the bitter controversy as to that question that was about to be caused by the rise of the “Know-nothing Movement.”

Thanks to that wonder-worker, Time, the lapse of fifty years rarely fails to take all the caloric out of “burning questions,” and is able to convert the startling forecasts of thinkers into the trite truisms of practical politics.

The animus against him, however, was probably of a persistent type. “From the ills of life,” says Longinus, “there is for mortals a sure haven—death, while the woes of the gods are eternal.” But successful authors are not much better off than the unlucky gods, for their names and their works survive them and can be tabooed.

The generous tribute from the Archbishop of Halifax and Mr. Senator Power, at the Haliburton Centenary meeting at Halifax, to the important services he had rendered three-quarters of a century ago, is a pleasing proof that a public man may safely do his duty and leave his life to the impartial verdict of a later generation.

A few years after taking up his residence in England, he paid a visit to Ontario, Canada, where he negotiated the purchase by the Canadian Land and Immigration Company of an extensive tract of country near Peterborough. Most of it that is not now sold is included in the county of Haliburton, which returns a member to the Ontario Legislature, and the county town of Haliburton is the terminus of the Haliburton branch of the Grand Trunk Railway.

In 1816, as already stated, he married Louisa, only daughter of Captain Laurence Neville, of the 19th Light Dragoons (she died 1840), by whom he had a large family.[[6]] And secondly, in 1856, Sarah Harriet, widow of Edward Hosier Williams, of Eaton Mascott, Shrewsbury, by whom he had no issue, and who survived him several years.

That life-long exile, the poet Petrarch, says that men, like plants, are the better for transplanting, and that no man should die where he was born. For years Judge Haliburton stagnated and moped in utter solitude at Clifton, for his large family had grown up and were settled in life elsewhere, while death had removed the little band of intellectual companions whose society had been a great source of enjoyment to him. But he got a new lease of life by migrating to England. His second wife was a very intelligent and agreeable widow lady of a good social position, who even after having made a considerable sacrifice of her means in order to marry him, was comfortably off. It was a very happy match, and she proved to be a most devoted wife. Before they were married she had leased Gordon House, situated on the Thames, not far from Richmond (a house built by George I. for the Duchess of Kendal, who after his death believed that her royal lover used to visit her in the form of a crow in what is still known as “The haunted room”). In time the gardens and grounds there were referred to as showing what lady floriculturists can accomplish. His family, most of whom resided in England, were delighted at seeing him in his old age well cared for in a comfortable home.

Gordon House, Isleworth.