The private letters from Upper Canada, in giving the account of
the late victory at Queenstown, are partly taken up with
lamentations upon the never-to-be-forgotten General Brock, which
do honour to the character and talents of the man they deplore.
The enemy have nothing to hope from the loss they have
inflicted; they have created a hatred which panteth for revenge.
Although General Brock may be said to have fallen in the midst
of his career, yet his previous services in Upper Canada will be
lasting and highly beneficial. When he assumed the government of
the province, he found a divided, disaffected, and, of course, a
weak people. He has left them united and strong, and the
universal sorrow of the province attends his fall. The father,
to his children, will make known the mournful story. The
veteran, who fought by his side in the heat and burthen of the
day of our deliverance, will venerate his name.
And the sentiments of the British Government, on the melancholy
occasion, were thus expressed in a despatch from Earl Bathurst, the
secretary of state for the colonies, to Sir George Prevost, dated
December 8, 1812:
His Royal Highness the Prince Regent is fully aware of the
severe loss which his Majesty's service has experienced in the
death of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock. This would have been
sufficient to have clouded a victory of much greater importance.
His Majesty has lost in him not only an able and meritorious
officer, but one who, in the exercise of his functions of
provisional lieutenant-governor of the province, displayed
qualities admirably adapted to awe the disloyal, to reconcile
the wavering, and to animate the great mass of the inhabitants
against successive attempts of the enemy to invade the province,
in the last of which he unhappily fell, too prodigal of that
life of which his eminent services had taught us to understand
the value.
The body of the fallen hero lay in state at the government house until
the 16th of October, when, with that of Colonel McDonell, it was buried
with due honours in a cavalier bastion of Fort George, at the spot now
marked by the tablet indicating the first burial-place. On the 13th of
October, 1824, the remains were moved to the summit of the heights,
whereon a beautiful monument had been erected by the Provincial
Legislature, 135 feet in height, bearing this "splendid tribute to the
unfading remembrance of a grateful people":
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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