Politically and socially one may include among the Loyalists the half-pay officers, from both {19} navy and army, whom the great peace after Waterloo sent to Canada, as to the other colonies; and certain men of good family, Talbots or Stricklands, who held fast by English conservative tradition, played, where they could, the English gentleman abroad, and incidentally exhibited no mean amount of public spirit. Conspicuous among these was Colonel Talbot, who had come to Upper Canada with Simcoe in 1793, and became there an erratic but energetic instrument of empire. "For sixteen years," says Mrs. Jameson, writing with a pardonably feminine thrill after a visit to the great man, "he saw scarce a human being, except a few boors and blacks employed in clearing and logging his land; he himself assumed the blanket coat and axe, slept upon the bare earth, cooked three meals a day for twenty woodsmen, cleaned his own boots, washed his own linen, milked his cows, churned the butter, and made and baked the bread."[13] Yet, as Strickland confesses, in his _Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West_, there were few Talbots. "Many high-spirited gentlemen," he says, "were tempted by the grants of land bestowed on them by the government, which made actual settlement one of the conditions of {20} the grant. It followed, as a matter of course, that the majority of these persons were physically disqualified for such an undertaking, a fact which many deserted farms in the rear townships of the county in which I reside painfully indicate."[14]