R. G. Haliburton

“ Experience is proving that the value attached by Sam Slick to the geographical position and natural advantages of the Province of Nova Scotia was not a mistaken one. We are, however, apt to be more grateful to those that amuse than to those who instruct us. Many persons who laughed at Sam Slick’s jokes did not relish his truths, and his popularity as an author was far greater out of Nova Scotia than in it; but it had ceased to depend on the verdict of his countrymen.
Artemus Ward pronounced him to be the “father of the American school of humor.” ”

“ Senator Power, at the Haliburton Centenary meeting at Halifax, to the important services he had rendered three-quarters of a century ago, is a pleasing proof that a public man may safely do his duty and leave his life to the impartial verdict of a later generation. ”

“ The organization is all wrong. They are two people, but not one. It shouldn’t be England and her colonies, but they should be integral parts of one great whole—all counties of Great Britain. There should be no tax on colonial produce, and the colonies should not be allowed to tax British manufactures. All should pass free, as from one town to another in England; the whole of it one vast home market from Hong-Kong to Labrador. . . . They should be represented in Parliament, help to pass English laws, and show them what laws they want themselves. ”

“ A traveller on reaching the most northern town in the world, Hammerfest, found that Sam Slick had been there before him, for the “Clockmaker” was a hobby and a textbook of a humorous Scotchman, who was the British consul there at that time.
Judge Haliburton was very fond of youthful society; old men were too old for him, for he used to say that a large majority of men when they begin to grow old become very prosy. On the other hand, his humor and conversational powers were very attractive to young men. ”

“ When he called, his Lordship said, “I am convinced that there is a veritable Sam Slick in the flesh now selling clocks to the Bluenoses. Am I right?” “No,” replied the Judge, “there is no such person. He was a pure accident. I never intended to describe a Yankee clockmaker or Yankee dialect; but Sam Slick slipped into my book before I was aware of it, and once there he was there to stay.” ”

“ It should no more be a bar to a man’s promotion, as it is now, that he lived beyond the sea, than being on the other side of the channel. It should be our navy, our army, our nation. That’s a great word, but the English keep it to themselves, and colonists have no nationality. ”

“ At that time, when the fate of England as a first-class power was in the balance, there was no need for the masses to be “educated up” to the subject; it was rather their statesmen and politicians that required to be educated down—down to the common sense of the common people. ”

“ The primary cause of its success, we conceive, may be found in its sound, sagacious, unexaggerated views of human nature—not of human nature as it is modified by artificial institutions and subjected to the despotic caprices of fashion, but as it exists in a free and comparatively unsophisticated state, full of faith in its own impulses and quick to sympathize with kindred humanity ”

“ Rarely do we find in any character, not excepting the best of Scott’s, the same degree of originality and force, combined with humor, sagacity, and sound sense, as we find in the Clockmaker. Industry and perseverance are effectively inculcated in comic story and racy narrative. In the department of instructive humor Haliburton stands, perhaps, unrivalled in English literature. ”

“ In some respects, perhaps, the prominence given to the Yankee dialect was a mistake, for, except in very isolated communities, dialect soon changes. A Harvard professor, nearly fifty years ago, indignantly protested against Sam Slick being accepted “as a typical American.” His indignation was a little out of place. It would be equally foolish in an Englishman should he protest against Sam Weller being regarded as a typical Englishman. Do typical Americans wander about in out-of-the-way regions selling wooden clocks? ”

“ A review of “Nature and Human Nature” drew attention to the fact that no writer has produced purer conceptions of the female character than are to be found in Sam Slick’s works. They show none of those morbid, sexualistic tendencies which are betrayed in some modern novels written by young ladies, or in semi-scientific papers on sexual subjects by “advanced females.” ”

“ Dickens sends off Pickwick in his wanderings without any apparent object in view, accompanied by a shrewd and humorous Cockney valet, whose sayings and doings are the prominent feature of the book; while Judge Haliburton sends off the author on very similar travels, accompanied by a cute Yankee, for whose yarns and jokes the book is simply a peg on which they can be hung. ”

“ This truly conservative and orthodox institution, in which the future author was crammed with classics, and taught to “fear God and honour the King,” was then considered one of the most successful educational institutions in America, and it still ranks high in its reputation as a college. It is the oldest in the Colonies, and it is the only one that has a Royal Charter.
Mr. Haliburton used often to puzzle his friends by saying that he and his father were born twenty miles apart, and in the same house.
The enigma throws some light on the early history of Windsor. ”

“ The first case that came up was tried before Judge Haliburton, much to the amusement of the public and to the edification of the Yankee clockmaker, who had a long homily read to him on the impropriety of cheating Bluenoses with Yankee clocks that would do anything sooner than keep time.
But a man may be a Yankee clockmaker without having the “cuteness” and common sense of Sam Slick. In his Early Reminiscences, Sir Daniel Lysons describes such an one who, while selling clocks in Canada, was tempted to stake his money and clocks, etc., on games of billiards with a knowing young subaltern. ”

“ In 1859, he consented to run for Launceston, where his friend, the Duke of Northumberland, had great influence. On his election he thanked his constituents, “in behalf of four million of British subjects on the other side of the water, who, up to the present time, had not one individual in the House of Commons through whom they might be heard.”
It seems almost providential that when an advocate of the Unity of the Empire was most sorely needed, he had for a quarter of a century been writing in favor of the colonies. ”

“ His father had extensive grants of land at Douglas, a place situated at the head waters of the St. Croix, a tributary of the Avon, as to which there is a gruesome tablet at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the memory of a nobleman, who lost his life “from exposure during an inclement winter, while settling a band of brave Carolinians” at Douglas. ”

“ But in Pictou County, which was largely settled by “dour” Cameronians, and which gloried in those annual and ever-recurring battles against the Bishop and his followers, there are no doubt types of “Old Mortality” that will never cease to denounce his retirement from the perennial strife as a great sin, and an act of treason to his country, or (what is the same thing) to the Pictou Academy.
In 1828, when only thirty-two years of age, he received the appointment of Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. ”

“ Though a majority of both parties, Conservatives as well as Liberals, agreed with their two leaders in their wish to get rid of the Colonies, (for Disraeli, as far back as 1852, wrote, “These wretched Colonies will all be independent in a few years, and are a millstone around our neck”) , the people were wiser and more patriotic than their politicians ”