Taschereau, Hon. Henry T., B.L., B.C.L., Montreal, Judge of the Superior Court of the province of Quebec, was born in the city of Quebec, on the 6th October, 1841. He is the son of the Hon. Jean Thomas Taschereau, late one of the judges of the Supreme Court of the Dominion, who, after being on the bench for nineteen years, was forced to resign his position in consequence of ill-health, in October, 1878. His grandfather, Hon. Jean Thomas Taschereau, was in his lifetime one of the puisne judges of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Lower Canada, and his grandmother, Marie Panet, was a daughter of the Hon. Jean Panet, first speaker of the House of Assembly for Quebec province, which he held for twenty consecutive years. Judge Taschereau, the subject of our sketch, is the fifth member of the Taschereau family who have sat on the bench of the province of Quebec, or of the dominion of Canada, and is a nephew of his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Quebec. The family is one of the oldest and most distinguished in that province, its founder in Canada having been Thomas Jacques, of Touraine, France, son of Christopher Taschereau, King’s counsellor, director of the mint, and treasurer of the city of Tours. This gentleman came to Canada about the beginning of the last century, was appointed treasurer of the marine, and in 1736 obtained the cession of a seigniory on the banks of the Chaudière river, Quebec province. Judge Taschereau was educated at the Quebec Seminary, and at Laval University, and received from Laval the degree of B.L., in 1861, and B.C.L. in 1862. He took up law as a profession, and practised in Quebec, with marked success, until he was elevated to the bench, in 1878. He was at one time a member of the city council of Quebec, and represented the city on the North Shore Railway Board. In 1862 he edited the newspaper, Les Debats, and in 1863 was one of the editors of La Tribune, of Quebec. He entered active political life in 1863, and ran as candidate for the county of Dorchester in the Legislative Assembly of Canada, but failed to secure his election. In 1872 he was more successful, and was returned as member for Montmagny county to the House of Commons. In 1874 he again presented himself for election, and was returned by acclamation. In politics, he was a Liberal. Being possessed of good talents and fine culture, with a good judicial mind, he has already done credit to his family of eminent parents. He was first married to a daughter of E. L. Pacaud, advocate of Arthabaska, on the 22nd June, 1864, and has a family of nine children. After the death of his first wife (Nov., 1883), he married in April, 1885, Mrs. Marie Masson, widow, of Montreal, sister-in-law of ex-Lieut.-Governor Masson. No children by last marriage.
McLachlan, Alexander, Erin, Ontario, was born at the Brig o’ Johnston, Scotland, in the year 1820. He is the son of a mechanic, and has had few of the advantages to be derived from a liberal education, yet from boyhood he was a great reader, and thus became acquainted with the works of the principal British authors. In early life he was apprenticed to a tailor, and worked at his trade for many years. In this way he fostered his inborn love of song, as few occupations are more conducive to the growth of poetic sentiment than a mechanical movement of the fingers, which leaves thought free to soar to heights that idleness could never hope to attain. In early life he became connected with the Chartist movement, but afterwards changed his views. In 1840 he emigrated to Canada, and, for a short time, made his home in the wild-wood; but since appearing before the public as an author and lecturer, he has resided at Erin, Wellington county, Ontario. The height of Mr. McLachlan’s ambition is to be to Canada what Burns was to Scotland: the poet of the people; and in this, we think, he has succeeded thus far. We cannot say that a greater than he may not appear in the future; but we have not yet seen any volume of Canadian verse equal to his in the simplicity that goes to the heart of the poor and lowly. In this respect he meets a want of the community, and occupies a position of honor that a poet of higher culture might vainly aspire to fill. It does not fall to the lot of every man to receive an education that will enable him to appreciate the classic beauties of a “Mulvaney” or a “Roberts,” or the chaste imagery of a “Maclean”; nor has nature gifted everyone with the “wild wealth of imagination” (we quote Collins) that would lead him to revel in the love-songs, of a “Caris Sima”; but what Canadian farmer, with a soul large enough to survive the transit to another sphere, would not feel the pathos of the lines that he writes on the death of his ox. This poem, though faulty in construction, brings the trials and sufferings of the early settler so graphically before the reader that it is impossible for us to overlook it. We quote the following lines:
Here, single-handed, in the bush, I battled on for years;
My heart sometimes buoyed up with hope; sometimes bowed down with fears.
I had misfortunes not a few, e’en from the very first;
But take them altogether, “Bright,” thy death’s the very worst.
And again he writes,
How can I ever clear the land? How can I drag the wheat?
How can I keep my credit good? How can my children eat?