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lding of a stone church in Montreal was commenced, but the structure which promised to be "one of the handsomest specimens of modern architecture in the province," was not finished, for want of funds, ten years afterwards. In Upper Canada, so late as 1795, no church had been built. Even in Newark, it is quaintly added by the Duke de la Rochefoucault Liancourt, in the same halls where the Legislative and Executive Councils held their sittings, jugglers would have been permitted to display their tricks, if any should have ever strayed to a country so remote. His Grace, quite correct with regard to Newark, was at fault in speaking of the whole province. At Stamford there was a Presbyterian Church, built in 1791, and another church built for the use of all persuasions, a kind of free and common soccage church, in 1795, which was destroyed in the subsequent war. It was in this year that one of the most remarkable men, and one of the most able and indefatigable of the colonial clergy, was strolling about Marischal College, in Aberdeen, studying philosophy. He was a very plain-looking Scotch lad and very cannie. Altogether wanting in that oratorical brilliancy so necessary for an efficient preacher of the great truths of Christianity, Mr. John Strachan had diligently acquired a dry knowledge of the humanities, to fit himself for a teacher of youth. He was, in a limited sense, a classical scholar. Greek and Latin, Hebrew and the Mathematics, were at his fingers' ends. Not long after leaving college, he obtained the place of a preceptor to the children of a farmer in Angus-shire. The situation of schoolmaster of Dunino, a parish situated foury miles south of St. Andrews, in Fifeshire, and six miles north of Anstruther, the school taught by Tennant, the orientalist, professor of Hebrew and other oriental languages in St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, and the author of the Poem of Anster Fair, became vacant, when Mr. John Strachan made application for the fat berth, the salary being nearly L30 a year, and obtained it. Mr. Strachan taught quietly at Dunino, attending St. Andrews College, in the winter, until he received the offer of L50 a year, as tutor to the family of a gentleman living in Upper Canada. He accepted it, left Dunino, and went to the wilderness. Mr. Strachan taught as a private tutor for some time and subsequently established a school for himself, when he married a widow possessed of cash and respectably connected. Th
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