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 Chateau,
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 fetes champetres of Sir James Craig at
Powell Place immortalized by old Mr. DeGaspe - 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.
