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91,006

The population by religions shows that the Roman Catholics have a large majority in Montreal over all other religions put together. The Church of England comes next in point of numbers:

Roman Catholics
Other religions.

66,099 . 25,007

91,106

Then we have a description of "other religions," and certainly there are plenty of them. Besides the Church of England and the two Churches of Scotland, there are United Presbyterians, American Presbyterians, Wesleyan Methodists, Episcopal Methodists, New Connexion Methodists, Jews, Baptists, Congregationalists or Independents, Unitarians, Lutherans. This is a pretty fair catalogue of sects for one town, but it does not comprise every form of religion after all, and it does not comprise no form, for I find after the few sects mentioned above, that there are still" Other Religions," to which 120 people belong, and that 52 people represent "No Religion." The members of the Church of England number 10,072; no other Church or sect is nearly so numerous, always excepting the Romanists.

It comes

There is a very humorous description, and interesting as well, of "Christmas in New Zealand," in the Montreal Church Chronicle. from a lady who lives near Auckland. I will give you some extracts;

"Our young friends at home who have just had their Christmas school-feasts may like to hear of ours at the antipodes. They have been as heartily enjoyed under a hot summer's sun as amid the snows and frosts of Old England.

"On Holy Innocents' Day, Archdeacon Kissling and Mrs. Kissling gave their yearly feast to the Sunday and day-school children in their (St. Barnabas) parish. It was held in the grounds of the Native Teachers' Institution,' of which the archdeacon is principal. I rode up about four o'clock, in the intense heat of a midsummer's afternoon, wondering as I went if one could be lively in such weather. The merry peals of laughter soon convinced me that the young ones were not at all languid. About two hundred children were assembled, and a good many of their relations, friends, and other visitors were walking about, or sitting in groups on the grass, watching the fun. The prizes had just been given, and the children been refreshed with ginger-beer and buns. The girls were playing at 'Round, round the mulberry-bush' and Thread my needle,' and the boys were running races in good English fashion; but on no playground at home would one see so many shades of colour, or hear so many languages spoken."

A description of "a school-fenst" and the games of children may possibly, at first sight, seem puerile and uninteresting, even infra dig. to the learned and adult reader. But are not these children's games suggestive of great events? Are not the children themselves, of every shade of colour, and of divers speech, possibly, nay almost certainly, destined to be the founders of a great nation? Depend upon it that "Round, round the mulberry-tree," and "races in good English fashion," are laying the foundation of future greatness in that far country. It is from these children that the awful New Zealander will spring, with whose prophesied advent in this doomed country we are but too familiar. It is, no doubt, dread of this New Zealander that has prevented the more rapid development of the Thames Embankment. Why waste time and money upon a work that is so soon to be swept away, to make room for picturesque ruins to gladden the eyes of "the son of an English father and a Maori mother?"

"The Orakei boys and girls," continues the writer, "all looked clean and tidy, very different from the unkempt, ragged, wild children in a native village generally. Old William Hobson was with them, as dignified and quaint as usual. He always dresses in black, and has a long cassock, a white cravat, and a black silk handkerchief, twisted like a turban, on his head. His face is so highly tattooed as to be almost black, and looks like a bit of carved ebony. With a long native spear in his hand, and a solemn expression on his face, he looks fit to keep any number of children in order. He marshalled his little force, thumped them with his spear if they straggled, and was altogether very funny, without meaning to be so.

"There were also several Maori grandmammas and aunts who came with the school they were not improved by old brown hats, with deep falls of lace, stuck on the top of their grizzly heads, but they were kind old souls, and took great interest in the lively scene."

I beg pardon for introducing this sketch from New Zealand, which certainly, at first sight, does appear nihil ad rem in conjunction with Canada. And yet, is it so entirely beside the mark? Although so many miles apart, are not the two countries united by a common parentage? Does not the Anglo-Saxon blood flow alike in the veins of the New Zealander and the Canadian? They are both links in that mighty chain which England has wound around the world, not to enslave, but to emancipate; not to coerce, but to elevate and enlighten.

Though England may be blamed for violence or fraud, or the lust of power and dominion (and what country is free from a like accusation?), she cannot now be accused of governing her possessions in a tyrannical or oppressive manner. Her colonies are dependencies of the mother country so long as they find it their interest to be so, and no longer. In fact, each colony has at this moment a government of its own, accountable, as a matter of course, to the English government whilst under its protection, but at liberty to secede and set up for itself whensoever it so pleases: not a tongue would wag, not a finger move in England to prevent

secession.

No, the chain with which England is encircling the earth is neither forged by slaves nor upheld by tyranny; it carries not the sword of destruction, but the anchor of hope, which sinks into the hearts of the heathen, and is watered by the tears of converts.

495

THE STORY OF RICHARD SAVAGE, DRAMATIST
AND POET.

THIS unfortunate author may be said to live through Dr. Johnson's Memoir of his life rather than in his own compositions, inasmuch as his works, eagerly as they were once sought for, and great as are their merits in many respects, are now seldom read. His story enlisted the sympathy of contemporaries, and his claim to noble birth was not denied in his lifetime; but it was doubted by Boswell (who, after stating the case pro and con., concludes that the "world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty as to what was the truth"), and it has since been called in question by more than one writer. No one, however, seems to have taken much pains to test and challenge it until within the last four years, when Mr. Moy Thomas revived the discussion of these historic doubts.

Anne, daughter of Sir Richard Mason, of Sutton, in the county of Surrey, married Charles Lord Brandon, afterwards Earl of Macclesfield, in 1683. They separated after a union of only a few months, and in the course of time she formed an intimacy with Richard Savage, Earl Rivers, which led to the birth of a daughter, who died when a few months old, and afterwards of a son, and subsequently to her divorce from her husband. In the mean time, what had been going on came to the ears of Lord Macclesfield. She undoubtedly wished to be separated from him, and she may have acknowledged the adulterous intercourse, as Dr. Johnson states her to have done; but, lest her title and fortune should be lost, great efforts were made to prevent his obtaining evidence. In December, 1696, under the name of Madame Smith, she took up her temporary abode in lodgings in Fox-court, a passage between Brook-street and Gray's Innlane, and there, on the 16th of January, 1697, gave birth to the second child, a son, who was christened on the 18th by the officiating minister of St. Andrew's, Holborn, and entered in the register as Richard, son of John and Mary Smith. Lord Rivers and a Mr. Ousley stood as godfathers in person, and Dorothy Ousley, his sister, as godmother. On the following day the child was taken to Hampstead, and entrusted to a Mrs. Peglear to be nursed, and she was told that the child's name was Richard Lee. In the following summer she was visited by the wife of Richard Portlock, a baker, in Maiden-lane, Covent-garden, who claimed the nursling as their child, and, after some altercation, carried it off. It has been conjectured that the Portlocks, who did not appear as witnesses in the earl's suit for divorce, were bribed to bring up the child as their own, and were only the agents of the Ousleys in removing him. At all events, he was never again seen by Nurse Peglear, and from this time all trace of his fate is lost. The earl, without further prosecuting his suit, obtained on the 15th of March, 1698, a special act of divorce (memorable as the first ever granted without previous sentence of the Ecclesiastical Court), and the countess, reduced to her maiden name of Anne Mason, married Colonel Brett, and lived with him until his death, in 1714.

Richard Savage, the poet, first appears in 1717, when he published a poem; and as far as can now be discovered, he made his first public claim to noble parentage in 1719, when he published another work-a

play-entitled "Love in a Veil: a Comedy written by Richard Savage, Gentleman, Son of the late Earl Rivers," in the dedication of which work to Lord Lansdowne he avowed himself to be "the son of Earl Rivers by the Countess of." His own story is that to which Dr. Johnson gave world-wide currency in his Memoir (which was published in 1744, while Mrs. Brett was still living). The outline of it is that Savage, by the agency of Lady Mason, the Countess of Macclesfield's mother, was placed in the care of a poor woman, who brought him up as her own child, and received payment from Lady Mason for her care; that his godmother, whom he calls Mrs. Loyd, died when he was only seven years of age, having by her will bequeathed to him a legacy of 3007.; that he was placed at a grammar-school near St. Alban's, where he received the only instruction ever given to him; that when he was about fifteen, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Holborn; and that while in this servile condition, the person whom he had always known as his mother died, and that on searching her boxes he found letters written to her by Lady Mason, which revealed to him that he was the son of Lady Macclesfield, born during the wedlock of the earl and countess, but that his father was Lord Rivers, and that he was doomed to be disowned. Savage further stated this discovery of his birth to have been made after the death of Lord Rivers; that the earl, when on his death-bed, had insisted on knowing what had become of his son, and had been informed by his mother that he was dead, whereupon he revoked a legacy of six thousand pounds, which he had bequeathed in the boy's favour; and that the intention of his mother, then Mrs. Brett, had been to send him secretly to the American plantations, but that she had been hindered by her relations from executing that unnatural project, and had thereupon destined him to a life of obscurity and labour.

Those who contend that Savage personated the lost son of Lady Macclesfield point to the many improbabilities which these statements involve, and to the fact that Savage was himself the sole authority for many of them. They ask, where was he during the intervening ten years whether the person whom he calls "his godmother, Mrs. Loyd," was identical with Dorothy Ousley? how he acquired the letters of Lady Mason, which he said revealed to him the injustice he had suffered; and why, if he possessed them, they were never produced? where the grammar-school "near St. Alban's" was? who was the shoemaker to whom he had been apprenticed? and what grounds he had for stating that persons were employed to kidnap and transport him? And it has been observed, that if the secret of his birth was discovered by him at the period of his boyhood when he lost his godmother, the fact of his existence could hardly have been concealed from Lord Rivers, who died some years later, viz. in 1712. Savage stated that on discovering who his mother really was, he sought to arouse her maternal feelings in his favour, but that she steadily refused to admit him to her presence, and that he used to walk in the dark evenings for hours before her house, in the hope of seeing her figure through the window, but she left him to grow to manhood the victim of her cruel aversion.

Those who say that Savage was a pretender, and was not the child that had disappeared, remark that the conduct of the countess towards the daughter, who died in infancy (as deposed to by witnesses in the

divorce suit), was so marked by natural solicitude as to make it improbable that she would act unfeelingly towards her son and would abandon him, and neglect all parental duties towards him. Savage himself (in "The Plain Dealer") speaks of her fine qualities, and again in

the lines:

Yet has this sweet neglecter of my woes

The softest tenderest breast that pity knows!
Her eyes shed mercy wheresoe'er they shine,
And her soul melts at every woe-but mine.

But although the questions asked by objectors may not have received satisfactory answers, and the inconsistencies pointed out may not have been reconciled, there are considerations of very great weight in favour of Savage's pretensions. There is the belief of Dr. Johnson, his companion and biographer, in their validity (and we may be quite sure he concealed nothing about Savage that was known to himself); there is the belief and acquiescence of contemporaries in his story, a memoir of which, drawn up soon after the appearance of his first play, had an immense circulation, and procured for him the intercession of the Countess of Hertford on the memorable occasion which will be mentioned presently; there is the fact that the charges of cruelty and unnatural conduct were made in the lifetime of his mother but were never refuted; and there is the conduct towards him of her own nephew, Lord Tyrconnel, who, if he had believed Savage to be an impostor, is not likely to have taken him to his house and companionship after her inhuman conduct had been publicly exposed.* There seems, indeed, to have been a very general acquiescence in the remark of Sir Richard Steele, that the conduct of Savage's mother had given him a right to find every good man his father; and the public interest in his behalf must have been grounded on the romantic circumstances of his early life, and on the cruelty of his fate, for his works could hardly have won for him such favour on literary grounds.

Savage's first comedy (produced, as we have seen, when he was little more than twenty years of age) brought him the friendship of Steele (who, however, was little calculated to teach him either prudence or frugality), and also the friendship of Wilks, the actor, which soon made him an assiduous frequenter of the theatres, and procured for him an occasional benefit. He had not attained his twenty-sixth year when he adapted the story of Sir Thomas Overbury to the stage-a work which Dr. Johnson deemed a remarkable proof not only of genius and power of imagination, but of equality of mind, for during its composition he was often without lodging and without food, and was accustomed to compose in the fields or the streets, and to beg from any shopkeeper as he passed, the use of pen and ink to write down the scenes he had composed. The publication of his tragedy not only made him, for the first time,

* It is undoubtedly to be borne in mind, as Croker has remarked, before we draw any conclusions from Mrs. Brett's forbearance to prosecute a libeller, that however innocent she might be as to Savage, she was undeniably guilty in other respects, and would have been naturally reluctant to drag her frailties again before the public. The story of his birth seems to have first appeared in Curll's "Poetical Register," in 1719; but that publication is not any authority, as Savage may himself have contributed the story.

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