A SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
In the absence of any suitable biography of the author of“The Clockmaker,” his centenary may lend an interestto the following brief sketch of his life and times.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born at Windsor, inthe Province of Nova Scotia, on the 17th day of December,1796. He was descended from the Haliburtons of Mertounand Newmains, a Border family, one of whom was BarbaraHaliburton, only child of Thomas Haliburton, of Newmains,who married Robert Scott, and whose second sonwas Walter Scott, the father of the immortal Sir Walter.Her eldest son left numerous descendants. Sir Walter’s tombis in the ancient burial place of the Haliburtons, St. Mary’sAisle, in Dryburgh Abbey. About the beginning of the lastcentury nearly all of her numerous uncles migrated toJamaica, and the eldest of them, Andrew Haliburton, removedthence to Scituate, near Boston, Massachusetts, wherehe, and, subsequently, his son William, married members ofthe Otis family, to which the well-known James Otisbelonged. William Haliburton (whose cousin, Major JohnHaliburton, Clive’s colleague, was, according to Mill’s Historyof India, “the Founder of the Sepoy force,”[3]) removed toNova Scotia with many persons from Scituate, when thevacant lands of the Acadian French were offered to settlers.His son, the Hon. William Hersey Otis Haliburton, ChiefJustice of the Court of Common Pleas, in Nova Scotia, marriedLucy Grant, a daughter of Major Alexander Grant, oneof Wolfe’s Highland officers at the siege of Quebec, who,after the French war, settled in the colony of New York,where he married a Miss Kent, a near relative of the famousChancellor Kent. He was killed in the Revolutionary War,at the storming of Fort Stanwix, while in command of theNew York Volunteers.
Chief Justice William Hersey Otis Haliburton left an onlychild, the future author of “Sam Slick,” who was educatedat the Grammar School, Windsor, and afterward, at the sameplace, at the University of King’s College, for Tory King’sCollege of the Colony of New York had migrated toWindsor, Nova Scotia, where, preserving the traditionsof Oxford of olden times, it remained out and out Tory inits politics, and continued unchanged, even after Oxford itselfhad long felt the influence of modern ideas. In its collegiateschool, as late at least as 1845, that venerable heirloom,“Lilly’s Latin Grammar,” which had not a word of Englishfrom cover to cover, and which was a familiar ordeal for boyslong before Shakespeare was born (Cardinal Wolsey, it issaid, assisted in its composition), was still employed. It evenretained the quaint old frontispiece representing boys withknee-breeches and shoebuckles (probably a picture of theoriginal “Blue-coat Boys”) climbing up the tree of knowledge,and throwing down the golden fruit. Daily, too, atthe meals in the College Hall there was, and perhaps maybe to this day, heard a quaint Latin grace, which was dronedby the “senior scholar,” beginning, Oculi omnium ad te spectant,Domine...