The following great Canadians were born in Toronto: Professor Egerton
Ryerson; Sir John MacDonald; Sir Daniel Wilson; Reverend Wm. Morley
Puncheon; Hon. George Brown; Sir Oliver Mowat; but the most widely known
Toronto citizen is probably Goldwin Smith, the great historian and
economist. Toronto has ever shown itself fervently British in sentiment.
Its later history has been purely civic without other interest than that
attaching to prosperous growth. A pleasant society and an attractive
situation make it a favourite place of residence.
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a certain Mr.
Hetherington in Toronto, one of the clerks of St. James. Now the music
of those primitive times seems to have been managed altogether after the
old country village choirs. Mr. Hetherington was wont, after giving out
the Psalm, to play the air on a bassoon; and then to accompany with
fantasias on the same instrument, when any vocalist could be found to
take the singing in hand. By-and-by the first symptoms of progress are
apparent in the addition of a bass-viol and clarinet to help Mr.
Hetherington's bassoon--"the harbinger and foreshadow," as Dr. Scadding
says, "of the magnificent organ presented in after-times to the
congregation of the 'Second Temple of St. James' by Mr. Dunn, but
destroyed by fire, together with the whole church, in 1839, after only
two years of existence."
Incidents of a different character no less strongly mark the changes
which a period of only ninety years has witnessed. In 1811, namely, we
find William Jarvis, Esq., His Excellency's Secretary, lodging a
complaint in open court against a negro boy and girl, his slaves. The
Parliament at Newark had, indeed, enacted in 1793--in those patriarchal
days already described, when they could settle the affairs of the young
province under the shade of an umbrageous tree--that no more slaves
should be introduced into Upper Canada, and that all slave children born
after the 9th of July of that year should be free on attaining the age
of twenty-five.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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