(See page 113.)
(From "Trifles from my Diary.")
"GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE," CORNER PALACE STREET
BY THE AUTHOR OF "MAPLE LEAVES."
Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum,
Cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum
Maluit esse Deum.
Horace, Sat I. 8.
Henry Ward Beecher begins an amusing sketch of our city with the words,
"Queer old Quebec, - of all the cities on the Continent of America, the
quaintest." He concludes his humorous picture by expressing the wish that
it may remain so without being disturbed by the new-fangled notions of the
day. Some one has observed that its walls, streets, public places,
churches and old monasteries, with the legends of three centuries clinging
to them, give you, when you enter under its massive gates, hoary with age,
[344] the idea of an "old curiosity shop," or, as the name Henry Ward
Beecher well expresses it, "a picture book, turning over a new leaf at
each street." It is not then surprising that the inhabitants should have
resorted not only to the pen of the historian to preserve evergreen and
fragrant the historical ivy which clings to its battlements, but even to
that cheap process, in use in other countries, to immortalize heroes -
signboards and statues - a process recommended by high authority. We read
in that curiously interesting book, "History of Signboards - "
"The Greeks honored their great men and successful commanders by erecting
statues to them; the Romans rewarded their popular favorites with
triumphal entries and ovations; modern nations make the portraits of their
celebrities serve as signs for public-houses:
Vernon, the Butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good have had their tithe of talk,
And filled their signpost then, like Wellesley now."
If Wolfe served as a signboard recently in Britain, he has filled the same
office now close on a century in Canada, and still continues to do so. He
has defied wind and weather ever since the day when the Cholette Brothers
affixed to the house at the north-west corner of St. John and Palace
streets a rough statue of the gallant young soldier in the year 1771, with
one arm extended in the attitude of command, and pointing to the Falls of
Montmorency.
Nor has Mr. de Gaspe, the author of the "Canadians of Old," thought it
beneath his pen to indite an able disquisition on its origin, brimful of
wealth for our antiquaries and a great deal more practical in its bearings
than even Jonathan Oldbuck's great Essay on Castrametation. A Three Rivers
antiquarian had attempted to establish that it was Ives Cholette who had
been the sculptor of the statue in question, but our old friend (through
the church registers - and through ancient and irrefutable records) showed
it could neither be Ives Cholette, aged, in 1771, 10 years, nor his
younger brother Hyacinthe, aged then but 8 years, who had designed this
great work of art, but Cholette of another ilk.
