[Footnote 11: I am very glad to see that Mr. Dent, in his "Forty Years--Canada since the Union of 1841," recently published, has avoided the current fault of those writers who can recognise no historical truth not endorsed by the _Globe_. In vol. i, p. 357, he says:
"There can be no doubt that the Reform party, as a whole, were unjust to Mr. Draper. They did not even give him credit for sincerity or good intentions. The historian of to-day, no matter what his political opinions may be, who contemplates Mr. Draper's career as an Executive Councillor, must doubtless arrive at the conclusion that he was wrong; that he was an obstructionist--a drag on the wheel of progress. But this fact was by no means so easy of recognition in 1844 as it is in 1881; and there is no good reason for impugning his motives, which, so far as can be ascertained, were honourable and patriotic. No impartial mind can review the acts and characters of the leading members of the Conservative party of those times, and come to the conclusion that they were all selfish and insincere. Nay, it is evident enough that they were at least as sincere and as zealous for the public good as were their opponents."
I wish I could also compliment Mr. Dent upon doing like justice to Sir Francis B. Head.]
Having, I hope, sufficiently exposed the misrepresentations of party writers, who have persistently made it their business to calumniate the Loyalists of 1837-8, I now proceed to the pleasanter task of recording the good deeds of some of those Loyalists, with whom I was brought into personal contact. I begin with--
No Toronto citizen of '37 can fail to recall the bluff, hale, strongly-built figure of George Taylor Denison, of Bellevue, the very embodiment of the English country squire of the times of Addison and Goldsmith. Resolute to enforce obedience, generous to the poor, just and fair as a magistrate, hospitable to strangers and friends, a sound and consistent Churchman, a brave soldier and a loyal subject, it seemed almost an anachronism to meet with him anywhere else than at his own birth-place of Dover Court, within sight of the Goodwin Sands, in the old-fashioned County of Essex, in England.
He was the son of John Denison, of Hedon, Yorkshire, and was born in 1783. He came with his father to Canada in 1792, and to Toronto in 1796. Here he married the only daughter of Captain Richard Lippincott, a noted U. E. Loyalist, who had fought through the Civil War in the revolted Colonies now forming the United States. In the war of 1812, Mr. Denison served as Ensign in the York Volunteers, and was frequently employed on special service. He was the officer who, with sixty men, cut out the present line of the Dundas Road, from the Garrison Common to Lambton Mills, which was necessary to enable communication between York and the Mills to be carried on without interruption from the hostile fleet on the lake. During the attack on York, in the following year, he was commissioned to destroy our vessels in the Bay, to save them from falling into the enemy's hands. With some he succeeded, but on one frigate the captain refused to obey the order, and while the point was in dispute, the enemy settled the question by capturing the ship, in consequence of which Mr. Denison was held as a prisoner for several months, until exchanged.
