ecome conspicuous in after-life. He absorbed knowledge with marvellous
facility, and never forgot anything he had learned. After leaving
college he repaired to London, where he was entered as a student-at-law,
and was in due time called to the bar of the Inner Temple. Like Bacon,
he seems to have taken all knowledge to be his province, for, not
satisfied with having acquired what, in so young a man, was accounted a
wide knowledge of jurisprudence, he studied for some time under Sir
Astley Cooper, and was enrolled as a member of the Royal College of
Surgeons. He soon afterwards returned to Canada, and took up his abode
on a lot of land in the Township of Charlotteville, about midway between
the villages of Turkey Point and Vittoria, in what is now the County of
Norfolk, but which then and for long afterwards formed part of the
Talbot District. In Michaelmas Term of 1821 he was called to the bar of
Upper Canada, and for some years thereafter he appears to have practised
the two professions of law and medicine concurrently. His great
acquirements and pleasant manners made him a favourite with all classes
of the people, and caused him to be regarded as a genuine acquisition to
the district in which he resided. He became the professional adviser and
familiar friend of Colonel Thomas Talbot, founder of the Talbot
Settlement, and was one of the originators of the Talbot Anniversary,
established in 1817, and kept up for more than twenty years thereafter,
in honour of the day of the Colonel's arrival at Port Talbot--the 21st
of May, 1803. The Colonel was not, in the strict sense of the term, a
politician, but he was a member of the Legislative Council, and
naturally supported the official party; whereas Rolph, though a man of
equable mind, and by no means constitutionally inclined towards
Radicalism, had much better opportunities for mixing with the people
than had Colonel Talbot, and his keen eye revealed to him many official
abuses which did not commend themselves to his sense of justice. It is
probable that differences of opinion on public questions led to their
ultimate estrangement. At all events, Rolph espoused the side of the
people, and declared himself a foe to the Family Compact policy, and
from that time forward the intimacy between him and Colonel Talbot seems
to have grown less and less. The Gourlay prosecutions aroused Rolph's
hot indignation, which he did not hesitate to express with much freedom
whithersoever he we