The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters

The re-emergence of Mephibosheth Stepsure one hundred and fourteen years after he entered the pages of the Halifax Acadian Recorder in 1821, seventy-three years after the publication of the Letters Of Mephibosheth Stepsure in 1862, and fifty-three years after the reprinting of four letters in the New Glasgow Eastern Chronicle in 1882 is a tribute to the durability of McCulloch's pawky little perso [...] In the space of four years we have created the most elegant building of its size in the province provided a considerable philosophical apparatus and laid the founda- EDITORR'S'S I INNTTRROODDUUCTION xxi tion of a library We enjoy also the approbation of the public in the House of Assembly we have no opposers and in the other branch we have the majority Still we are poor and depressed because the p [...] When properly employed, they con- ciliate to piety and virtue, one of the strongest principles of the mind; and human excellence is not acquired by the eradication or the neglect of original powers, but by render- ing the operation of each, subservient to the improvement of the whole.73 After McCulloch arrived in Scotland in 1825, he took "Colonial Gleanings" to the publishing firm of William Olip [...] Donald Stephens' review of The Stepsure Letters in Canadian Literature in the autumn of 1961 recognized the comic quality of the work,98 while Fred Cogswell, Vincent Sharman, Beverly Rasporich, Anne Wood, and Stanley McMullin have subsequently responded to its Calvinist over- tones." Robin Mathews has linked the Stepsure letters to the novel of the land, and Gwendolyn Davies to the theme of agri- [...] In this edition of The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters the copy-text for Letters 1 to 17 is the holograph manuscript of "The Chroni- cles of our Town." Although it is not the original manuscript (now apparently lost) of the letters that McCulloch sent to the Acadian Recorder in 1821-22, "The Chronicles of our Town" contains the version of the letters that McCulloch "corrected and copied" from the ne