Mr. Rolph's peculiarities were probably inherent, for the facts of his early life, so far as known, afford no clue to the reading of the riddle. He was the second son in a family consisting of eighteen children, and was born at Grovesend, in the market town of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, England, on the 4th of March, 1793. His father, Thomas Rolph, was a physician of some local repute, who seems to have been impelled to emigrate in consequence of the impossibility of making any suitable provision in England for so numerous a progeny. The ascertained facts with reference to John Rolph's early life in England are singularly meagre. He accompanied his parents to Canada some time prior to the War of 1812, for he served as a volunteer during the early part of that conflict, and was for some months a paymaster of militia. During the progress of the war he was taken prisoner by the enemy, and was detained in custody for a short time at Batavia, in the State of New York. An exchange of prisoners having been effected, he was set at liberty. After his liberation he returned to England, where he entered one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge; and, though he seems to have left there without taking a degree, he was recognized as a young man of very remarkable and precocious intellectual powers, likely to become conspicuous in after-life. He absorbed knowledge with marvellous facility, and never forgot anything he had learned. After leaving college he repaired to London, where he was entered as a student-at-law, and was in due time called to the bar of the Inner Temple. Like Bacon, he seems to have taken all knowledge to be his province, for, not satisfied with having acquired what, in so young a man, was accounted a wide knowledge of jurisprudence, he studied for some time under Sir Astley Cooper, and was enrolled as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He soon afterwards returned to Canada, and took up his abode on a lot of land in the Township of Charlotteville, about midway between the villages of Turkey Point and Vittoria, in what is now the County of Norfolk, but which then and for long afterwards formed part of the Talbot District. In Michaelmas Term of 1821 he was called to the bar of Upper Canada, and for some years thereafter he appears to have practised the two professions of law and medicine concurrently. His great acquirements and pleasant manners made him a favourite with all classes of the people, and caused him to be regarded as a genuine acquisition to the district in which he resided. He became the professional adviser and familiar friend of Colonel Thomas Talbot, founder of the Talbot Settlement, and was one of the originators of the Talbot Anniversary, established in 1817, and kept up for more than twenty years thereafter, in honour of the day of the Colonel's arrival at Port Talbot--the 21st of May, 1803. The Colonel was not, in the strict sense of the term, a