in the society I see you moving in here." A great deal of the impertinent reference to the superiority of things in the old country, is meant not to do honour to the old country, but to the speaker. "I was born in Castle Bunkum," says a lady as she uses her fan and expands with vanity at the thought of a fictitious aristocratic ancestry. What would her hearers think if told that Castle Bunkum is a paltry village ?

Lord Dufferin was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He succeeded to his father's title in 1841, when he was only fifteen years of age. It was, from more than one point of view, unfortunate for Lord Dufferin that he succeeded so early to a peerage. He was thus deprived of an opportunity of entering the House of Commons, where alone a great parliamentary reputation can be made in England. What an extinguisher the House of Lords is may be gathered from the fact that until Lord Dufferin came to Canada, scarcely anybody in the British Isles gave him credit for the great capacity he is now universally acknowledged to possess people had scarcely a hint of his extraordinary and various powers. They were known to his intimates, and the public were sometimes puzzled to know why it was that, in authooritative quarters, he was rated so high. The speech which Lord Dufferin made at the Toronto Club in 1874 set some of the English journalists almost wild. In an article in the London Spectator-one of the ablest papers in the world, which is edited by an Englishman-a writer-evidently the editor-grew dithyrambic over the speech and the orator, and, with that curious ignorance of this country which so often startles us in English publicists, it was asked why Mr. Gladstone had not sent Lord Dufferin to Ireland instead of Canada? Lord Dufferin, it was said, while still at home, breathed forth no such notes of triumphant confidence in the future of the Empire as characterised this famous speech, which was like a breath from the mountains on the fevered brow of the editor in the close office near Waterloo Bridge, under the refreshing influence of which he seems to break away from the dungeon of dulled ambition, contracted hopes and ignoble fears, from the suffocating atmosphere which in recent years, and up to a very late period, a mean statesmanship cast over the country of Raleigh, and he gasps out to inhale great

draughts of Lord Dufferin's stimulating thought, like Marie Stuart, in Schiller's play, when she is allowed to ramble from her confinement into the grounds surrounding her castellated prison. Lord Dufferin had for two years lived among us, had made himself master of every notable feature of Canada, social, political and physical; had spoken at banquets; had replied to deputations; had given useful lectures in a pleasing way to ladies' schools, and, when he spoke at the dinner of the Toronto Club, he had just returned from the North-West. He had seen the vigorous settler, with axe in hand, hope in his heart and a happy brood around him; proud cities rising as if by magic; he had stood on the margins of lakes glimmering amid the primeval forest, and saw the vision of the future. Everywhere he found Canada like a youth that means to be of note at work betimes, and the Sheridan blood would have strangely degenerated if his imagination had not taken fire. The same writer wrote in an equally enthusiastic strain of Lord Dufferin's speeches in the early part of the present year. When at such a distance Lord Dufferin can, when he has an opportunity make his popular genius felt, what might he not have done had he had an opportunity of bringing his large and various talents to bear on the real source of power in England.

Lord Dufferin was for many years a Lord in waiting to the Queen. He is a successful author. He published an account of the famine of 1846-7. Having in 1859 made a yacht-voyage to Iceland, he published in 1860 a narrative of the voyage under the title "Letters from High Latitudes," which are brimful of humour. He was in the same year sent as a British Commissioner to Syria to inquire into the massacre of the Christians there. He acted with great capacity and firmness and on his return to England was made a K.C.B. From 1864 to 1866 he was Under Secretary of State for India, and for War from 1866 to the following year. He was from 1868 until he was appointed GovernorGeneral of Canada, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Paymaster-General. Lord Dufferin contributed much both by voice and pen to the discussion of the Irish land question and Irish questions generally, and helped materially to precipitate Mr. Gladstone's reforms.

How he has discharged the duties of his great office in Canada

does not need to be told here to-day. His conduct during the excitement of 1873 was characterized by firmness, by grasp of constitutional principles, and by consummate tact, and when he leaves our shores, he will take with him the respect and admiration-nay, almost the affection of every man and woman in Canada, for his noble bearing and sympathetic genius have given him a warm place in the hearts of thousands who never saw him.

I now conclude. The history of the Irishman in Canada closes as it opened with the name of an Irish Governor-General on my pen. I have shown what part the Irishman has played in clearing the forest, in building up the structure of our civic life, in defending the country, in battling for our liberties, in developing our resources, in spreading enlightenment, in the culture of literature and art, in tending the sacred fires of religion, in sweetening the cares of life, and I trust I have done this without giving offence in any quarter, or forgetting for a single instant that my paramount duty, as the paramount duty of us all, belongs to Canada.

FINIS.

INDEX.

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Annexation and Independence, 252, Baldwin, Rev. A. H., 629