Carten, a very prominent and respected Irishman living in Halifax, having been excommunicated, was denied access to his pew in St. Mary’s Cathedral, of which he was _the legal owner_. Judge Haliburton’s ruling in favor of the plaintiff in Carten _vs._ Walsh _et al._ was a very able one. This was probably the only case in which a judge in Nova Scotia ever had to order a court room to be cleared in consequence of manifestations of public excitement and feeling. 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.