Longwood
The Country Seat of the Hon. Wm. Smith (1760-1847.)
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea,
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The — square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land,
If a step should sound or a word be spoken
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?
SWINBURNE’S Forsaken Garden.
On a grey, cheerless May afternoon, I visited what I might call the ruins of this once bright abode—Longwood—at Cap Rouge. Here the eccentric, influential and scholarly historian of Canada and statesman, the Honorable William Smith, spent the evening of his long and busy life. Whence the name Longwood? Did the Hon. William bestow on his rustic home the name of the residence where sojourned his illustrious contemporary—his admired hero, Napoleon I. (born like himself in 1769), to commemorate his own release from the cares of State? Was Cap Rouge and its quiet and sylvan bowers to him a haven of rest like St. Helena might have been to the Petit Caporal?
The locality, at present, can only attract from its woodland views. The house, of one story, is about eighty feet in length by forty in breadth, of wood, with an oval window over the entrance to light up that portion of the large attic. Its roomy lower apartments and attics must have fitted it admirably for a summer retreat. It is painted a dull yellow; the blinds may have been once green. When I saw it, I found it as bleak, as forlorn, as the snows and storms of many winters can well make a tenantless dwelling.
Outside, the “ghost of a garden” had stared at me, and when the key turned and grated in the rusty old lock of this dreary tenement, with its disjointed floors, disintegrated foundations, darkened apartments with shutters all closed, I almost thought I might encounter within the ghost of the departed historian;
All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before,
still the time had been when the voice of revelry, the patter of light feet, the meeting of many friends, had awakened gladsome echoes in these now silent halls of Longwood. Traditions told of noted dinner parties, of festive evenings, when Quebec could boast of a well appointed garrison, and stately frigates crowded its port.
How many balls at the Barons’ Club? how many annual dinners of the Veterans of 1775, at Menut’s? how many levees at the old Château, had the Laird not attended from the first, the historical levee of Dec. 6, 1786, “where the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester, monopolised the kissing,” so graphically depicted by William’s dignified papa, [249] the Chief Justice, down to the jocund fêtes champêtres of Sir James Craig at Powell Place immortalized by old Mr. DeGaspé—to the gay soirees of the Duke of Richmond—the literary reunions of the scholarly Earl of Dalhousie—the routs and lawn parties at Spencer Wood.
The Honorable William Smith, a son of the learned chief Justice of New York in 1780—of all Canada in 1785, was indeed a prominent figure in Quebec circles for more than half a century; his high, confidential and official duties, his eminent position as member of the Executive Council, to which his powerful protector Earl Bathurst had named him in 1814—his refined and literary tastes, his tireless researches in Canadian annals, at a time when the founts of our history as yet unrevealed by the art of the printer, lay dormant under heaps of decaying—though priceless—M.SS. in the damp vaults of the old Parliament Buildings; these and several other circumstances surround the memory, haunts and times of the Laird of Longwood with peculiar significance.
But for the Honorable William one bleak autumn came, when the trees he had planted ceased to lend him their welcome shade—the roses he had reared, to send perfume to his tottering frame—the garden he had so exquisitely planned, to gladden his aged eyes. He then bid adieu forever to the cherished old spot and retired to his town house, now the residence of Hon. Chas. Alleyn, Sheriff of Quebec, [250] where those he loved received his last farewell on the 7th December, 1847, bequeathing Longwood to his son Charles Webber Smith, who lived some years there as a bachelor, then decked out his rustic home for an English bride and retired to England where he died in 1879. Desolation and silence has reigned in the halls of Longwood for many a long day, and in the not inappropriate words of Swinburne,
Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not.
As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry;
From the thickets of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Chief Justice Smith [251] concerning house-keeping, house-furnishing château ceremonies, etc, at Quebec in 1786, wrote thus in a letter to his wife:
QUEBEC, 10th Dec., 1786.
Mrs. Janet Smith, New York.
My dear Janet,
“Not a line from you yet! so that our approach to within 600 miles is less favourable to me hitherto, than when the ocean divided us by three thousand. It is the more vexatious, as we are daily visited by your Eastern neighbors, who, caring nothing for you, know nothing of you, and cannot tell me whether McJoen’s or the Sopy Packet is arrived. If the latter is not over, there will be cause for ill boding respecting Mr. Lanaudière, who, I imagine, left the channel with the wind that brought us out.
If the packet is on the way for Falmouth, get my letters into it for Mr. Raphbrigh, it contains a bill for £300 sterling to enable him to pay for what you order. You have no time to spare. A January mail often meets with easterly winds off the English coast, that blows for months, and we shall be mortified if you arrive before the necessary supplies, which, to be in time, must come in the ships that leave England in March or on the beginning of April.
I have found no house yet to my fancy. None large enough to be hired. We shall want a drawing-room, a dining or eating-room, my library, our bedroom, one for the girls, another for Hale and William, and another for your house-keeper and hair-dresser. Moore and another man servant will occupy the eight. And I doubt if there is such a house to be hired in Quebec. To say nothing of quarters for the lower servants who, I think must be negroes from New York as cheapest and least likely to find difficulties. My Thomas’s wages are 24 guineas and with your three from England will put us to £100 sterling per annum.
If you bring blacks from New York with you, let them be such as you can depend upon. Our table will always want four attendants of decent appearance. The hurry of the public arrangements prevents me from writing, as I intended, to my friends on the other side of the water, nor even to Janet upon the great wish of my heart, tell her so, but she will know what can be done in time, for she cannot leave England till April or May, at any time before August to be here in good season. I have written to Vermont upon the subject of Moore Town and hear nothing to displease me, as yet, if no mischief has been done to our interests in that country, there will be peace, I believe; but of this more when I have their Governor’s answer to my letters. They already ask favours and must first do justice.
Our winter is commenced and yet I was never less sensible of the frost. The stoves of Canada, in the passages, temper the air through all the house. I sit ordinarly by a common hearth which gives me the thermometer at 71 or 72, nearly summer heat. The close cariole and fur cap and cloak is a luxury only used on journeys. The cariole alone suffices in town. The Rout of last Thursday demonstrates this: 50 ladies in bright head dresses and not a lappet or frill discomposed. All English in the manner, except the ceremony of kissing which my Lord D. (Dorchester) engrossed all to himself. His aide-de-camp handed them through a room where he and I were posted to receive them. They had given two cheek kisses and were led away to the back rooms of the château, to which we repaired when the rush was over. The gentlemen came in at another door. Tea, cards, etc., that till 10 o’clock and the ceremony ended. I stole away at 9 and left your son to attend the beauty of the evening, a Mrs. Williams, wife to a major Williams and a daughter to Sir John Gibbons of Windford, a lady of genteel manners as well as birth. He did not find his lodging till near midnight. We had a dance that day at the Lt. Governor’s. You must know General Hope. He was often at General Robertson’s under the name of Col. Harry Hope, nephew to Lord Hopetown in Scotland, to Lord Darlington (by his mother’s second marriage) in England. His table is in very genteel fashion. It reminds me that Mrs. Mallet must not forget all those little ornaments of plate, glass, etc., that belong to a dining-room. No water plates, the rooms don’t require them, the plates being sufficiently heated by the stoves. But water dishes are necessary for soup and fish fricassees all in the shape of the proper dishes for such articles. Don’t forget, among others, the silver gravy cups with double cavities, the larger for hot water. They are small hand ones, not unlike a tea pot. Mrs. Mallet will find these at all the great shops and particularly at Jones, in Cockspur street, near Charing Cross, where I bought my Mary’s watch chain. William that understands Latin and French letters better than his native tongue, importunes my ordering a set of classical books, which he is welcome to, if you can purchase at N. Y. a small bill for about £15 sterling and enclose it in my letter to Mr. Ryland. If that is inconvenient to you stop my letter, and I will find other means to gratify his inclination. There is a very good library [252] here, and many private ones at my friends. How wretched your general affairs? if our Yankey informers speak the truth, multitudes are disposed to turn their heads from that draught, which I thought they would not long relish. Lord D. with the generosity and charity he always indulged, bids them welcome, disposed as he says to favour even the independant Whigs of America, above any other nation under heaven, for tho’ no longer brethren, they are at least our cousins, branches from the same stock.
I have infinite consolation, in having dissuaded the parties from the steps, that led to all the calamities they have felt and still dread and more cheerfully will grasp at the means to lessen these afflictions, as the surest path to the greatest glory. I am solicited from Cambridge for a gift for pious uses, and find that you have been applied to, and probably will again. My promise shall most certainly be fulfilled. It was to give a lot for a church. But as I told them it was to be a gift to Christianity and not to Sectarianism. Religion and party are two different things. Tell them so that my gift will be to all Protestants, that is to say to the majority of the town being protestants, be the denomination what it may, and that I may not be imposed upon, I shall put my seal to no deed, before they bring me Dr. Rodger’s certificate upon the subject. My best respects to him with compliments to Mrs. T., Mr. Ainslie, Mr. and Mrs. Foxcraft and all your friends.
The snapping of my wood fires makes me think of yours. Don’t forget them yourself. Your three hundred acres of shingles, chills the blood in my veins…. Adieu. The broad hand of Heaven protect you!
I am, my dearest,
Most faithfully yours,
W. S.