interest in local military matters. In 1806 he offered to take charge of an expedition for the invasion of Paris, being probably impelled thereto by the mad attempt of Lord Camelford several years before. He was full of energy and robust health, bountiful and generous to the poor of the parish, a practical philanthropist, possessed of great intelligence and a genuine love for his kind; but withal somewhat flighty and erratic, of impetuous temper, deficient in tact and discretion, and given to revery and theorizing. He was, in short, a bundle of contradictions, some of his idiosyncrasies being doubtless inherited from his father, who was a generous and high-minded but unpractical man. The sire would seem to have been conscious of his son's weaknesses. "Robert," he was wont to say, "will hurt himself, but do good to others." The son studied deeply the economical side of the pauper question, and his researches in this direction brought him into intimate relations with that eminent writer Mr. Arthur Young,[5] at whose suggestion he was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the condition of the poor in England. By virtue of this appointment he travelled, chiefly on foot, through the most important agricultural districts of the island, after which he was pronounced by competent authorities to be the best-informed man in the kingdom respecting the poor of Great Britain. As I have said elsewhere: "He was consulted by members of Parliament, political economists, parish overseers, and even by members of the Cabinet, as to the best means for reforming the poor laws, and was always ready to spend himself and his substance for the public good."[6]

Having married and settled down on one of his father's estates, he took upon himself various offices of public usefulness and philanthropy. His enterprise and public spirit caused him to be much looked up to by the yeomanry of Fifeshire, and he soon came to be recognized as the special champion of the smaller tenantry at agricultural meetings. At one of these meetings he conceived himself to have been discourteously treated by his neighbour, the Earl of Kellie. The discourtesy does not seem to have been of a serious nature, but Mr. Gourlay became irritated to a degree altogether disproportionate to the offence. He wrote and published a pamphlet, in which Lord Kellie was handled with much severity. It was circulated by the author throughout Fifeshire, and widely read; and from this time forward he was much given to taking the public into his confidence respecting his personal grievances. His attack on Lord Kellie, however, weakened his popularity, and in 1809, partly owing to this cause, and partly to his being in temporary ill-health, he accepted a proposal from the Duke of Somerset to become the tenant of a farm belonging to his Grace, and situated in the parish of Wily, in Wiltshire. For a time all went well with him in his new abode. His farm was a model for the emulation of all the landholders in the parish, and his products gained prize after prize at successive agricultural exhibitions. But Mr. Gourlay was nothing if not critical, and certain of his surroundings afforded legitimate grounds for fault-finding. There were many and serious defects in the system of administering the poor-laws of Great Britain in those days, and the administration in the parish of Wily was attended by some specially objectionable features. These erelong became painfully apparent to the keen eyes of Mr. Gourlay, who began to agitate for a reform. He went into the matter with characteristic earnestness, and, by dint of constant speechifying and weekly letters addressed to the local newspapers, he soon began to produce an impression. His appetite for agitation grew by what it fed upon, insomuch that he became a confirmed grievance-monger and hunter-up of abuses. The magnates of the county began to look coldly upon him, and even, in some instances, to array themselves in open opposition to him. This only tended still further to arouse the native pugnacity of his disposition, and his attacks upon local abuses and those who upheld them became more and more violent. Now, in all this there can be no doubt that Mr. Gourlay was from first to last chiefly actuated by genuine philanthropy. He certainly had no selfish or pecuniary purpose to serve; and indeed it is hard to conceive of a man less influenced by mercenary motives. His life was passed in a perpetual war against veritable and undoubted evils; but unfortunately his hotheadedness and want of tact prevented him from doing justice to himself and his views. He lacked the calm intellect and patient temper necessary to the successful fighting of life's stern battle, and had the unhappy faculty of generally putting himself in the wrong, even when there could be no doubt that he had originally been in the right. Some of his letters to the newspapers were remarkable for nothing but their indiscretion, violence and bad taste, and he came to be looked upon by the landlords of Wiltshire as a visionary and dangerous man. His own landlord, the Duke of Somerset, was of this way of thinking, and after some remonstrances at second-hand which proved unavailing, his Grace resolved that this "pestilent Scotchman" must be got rid of. A bill in Chancery was filed against him on some pretext or other, with the view of putting an end to his tenancy. Years of irritating and ruinous litigation followed, the ultimate result of which was a decision in Mr. Gourlay's favour. But it was the old story of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. The protracted litigation had eaten up the substance of the successful litigant, and upon the promulgation of the decree the Wiltshire Radical was a ruined man. This would have been a matter of secondary importance to the heir of a wealthy Fifeshire laird, but unhappily his father had also come to the end of his resources. Injudicious speculation and the mismanagement of an agent, combined with the necessity of placing a large quantity of real estate in the market at an inauspicious time, were the causes which led to the bankruptcy of the elder Gourlay, who was stripped of his great possessions and left with a bare subsistence. The son's prospects of inheriting a fortune were thus at an end, and at thirty-seven years of age he found himself almost wholly without means, and with a family of five children and a wife in delicate health dependent upon him for support. The howl of the wolf began to be audible to him; distant, as yet, but still gradually drawing nearer. To his mind, a change of the base of his operations was clearly indicated.

Five years before this time he had acquired a block of land in the Township of Dereham, in the County of Oxford, Upper Canada, where his wife also owned some property. He now began to cast his eyes anxiously towards the setting sun, with a view to the rehabilitation of his broken fortunes. After weighing the matter carefully, he resolved to cross the Atlantic and pay a visit to Canada, in order to ascertain whether it would be prudent to remove his family thither. He seems to have been very deliberate about making up his mind, as he did not set sail from Liverpool until the month of April, 1817, and did not reach Canada until early in June. The country delighted him, more especially the Upper Province; but one with so keen an eye for abuses had not far to look throughout our fair land in those days for subjects of criticism. Having made himself acquainted with some of the most glaring iniquities of the ruling faction, and with the various causes which tended to retard the progress