Bengough and Carlyle

BENGOUGH AND .CARLYLE D. R. KEYS ((ONLY as the gaseous-chaotic Appendix to that . aqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents of the Six Bags hover round us, and portions thereof be incorporated with our delineation of it". Sartor, Bk. I, Ch. XI. -Canada has been called the Scotland ofNorth America. I ts geographical position in the northern naIf of the continent, with the great English-speaking republic to the south of it, would suggest the comparison. Historical facts bear it out. For more than two huridred years the Hudson's Bay Company has drawn its factors mainly from Scotland, so that even before Quebec_was captured by. Wolfe and.his Highlanders "that true North" already had a Scottish infusion in its population. Many of .those Highlanders settl~d in Quebec and intermarrying with the "French habitants increased the- Scottish element. The Selkirk settlement, the Gaels of Glengarry. and of Cape Breton and Prince Edward Islands added to thenumber . And the climax is capped by Nova Scotia with its traditions of Scottish knighthood and its claims on a foothold in Edinburgh Castle. Moreover, partly from loyalty to the British crown, partly from their wellknown clannishness, the Scotch when emigrating to America, seem to have preferred Canada to the United States. . AnothGr analogy may be found in the frequency with which Canadians, l~ke Scots, seek a larger career for their , tarents in the richer and more populous country to the south. Nor is there any lack of successes to parallel the achievements of Tait and Thomson, of Caird and Carlyle 49 THE VNIVERSIT! OF TORONTO QUARTERLY in England. Witnes~ the .careers of Bishops Anderson of Chicago, Breen of Buffalo, and Acheson of Connecticut, of President Schurman of Cornell and Dean Schofield of Harvard as well as those of Sir William Osler and Dr. H. H. Plaskett, who after holding chairs in Johns Hopkins and Harvard were called to the Regius professorship of Medicine and the SaviJian chair of Astronomy in the ' University of Oxford. And of what the Scots have done in Canada volumes have been written. No. I Carlyle hImself had at one time, not long aft'er the publication :0£ Sartor, the -idea of emigrating to Canada. We find him , writing to his ' brother Alexander from Chelsea, March 5, 1837, "Nay, in America itself; I will still trust to see you; and what is more, under better circumstances than our wont was. . .My Mother, too, may perhaps go to America, and the whole set of us root , and branch! -Far older emigrants than she have gone." A few years later'after HAlick" himself had emigrated and so I , BENGOUGH AND CARLYLE set up his "bield" near Brantford, Carlyle wrote to him, "Consider yourself the harbinger and pioneer of th~ others, not as one cut off from them...1 hope yet to see you in . Canada one day and sit by your hearth on gro'l:lnd that · belongs to yourself and the Maker alone." This hope was never. fulfilled but the Canadian branches of the family have done good work in art, literature and science. James Carlyle, the father · of Thomas, had two families, having been twice married. The author of 8,artor Resartus belonged to the second' family and it was · to his' younger brother Aleck that Thomas wrote'as quoted above. . CiIriously enough there 'was a John in each of the families~ Dr. John Carlyle, the translator of Dante's Inferno, whose name appears so often in the ' Carlyle ,correspondence and to whom Thomas was so generous, was his full brother but seems to have been no great favourite of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The other John, the half brother, went out to Canada and settled near Woodstock , where one of his sons became 'a Public School Inspector. This son William had a daughter Florence, whose art work appealed to the Princess Louise when she was founding a Royal Society and an Academy of Art in Ottawa. .Miss· Carlyle was made a member of the Academy and afterwards won recognition for her paint": ings in the ateliers and salons of Paris. Her brother William A. Carlyle graduated aiMcGill in 1887 with the B.A.A.S. gold medal in...