No two human beings could well be more unlike than were William Lyon Mackenzie and John Rolph. They were compelled to work together in a common cause for many years, but the two entities were thoroughly antagonistic, and there was never much personal liking between them. The structure of their bodies was not more dissimilar than was that of their minds. The one, slight, wiry, and ever in motion, seemed as though it might be blown hither and thither by any strong current. The other, solid almost to portliness, was suggestive of fixity--of self-dependence, and unsusceptibility to outside influences. The one was suggestive of being in a great measure the creature of circumstances; the other of being a law unto himself--one who would be more likely to influence circumstances than to be influenced by them. Mackenzie's nature, though it could not strictly be called a shallow one, at any rate lay near the surface, and its characters were not hard to decipher, even upon a brief acquaintance. There were depths in Rolph's nature which were never fathomed by those nearest and dearest to him--possibly not even by himself. Mackenzie seems to have long regarded Rolph with a sort of distant awe--as a Sphinx, close, oracular, inscrutable. Rolph evidently estimated Mackenzie correctly, as one whose politics were founded upon deeply-rooted convictions, and not upon mere opinions, although he would probably have found it difficult to subject those opinions to a rigid analysis; as one whose energy and journalistic resources might be turned to good account in the cause of Reform, but whose discretion was not always to be relied on. This estimate, indeed, was sufficiently obvious to any one who maintained frequent or familiar relations with Mackenzie, and was concurred in by most, if not all, of his friends. His earnestness and good faith, however, were manifest to all who knew him, and these were sufficient to cover much more culpable weaknesses than any which he had hitherto displayed.