At the time of his second entry into the Parliamentary arena Mr. Perry was only fifty-six years of age, but he had passed a very busy life, and had taxed his physical energies to the utmost. He was older than his years, and was no longer the same man who had once so scathingly denounced the Family Compact. For the first few months, however, he applied himself with vigour to his Parliamentary duties, and made several effective speeches. Age had not abated one jot of his advanced radicalism. He allied himself with the extremists of the Reform Party, and in consequence was not high in the favour of Mr. Baldwin, but there was not, so far as we are aware, any personal difference between them. Early in 1851 he found himself so much prostrated by physical weakness that he was compelled to leave home for change of air and scene. He went over to Saratoga Springs, New York, which was then the fashionable watering-place of this continent. Its waters were supposed to possess marvellous powers to restore youth to the aged and infirm, and Mr. Perry remained there for several months. He had, however, literally worn himself out in the public service, and it soon became evident that his ringing voice would never again be heard within the walls of Parliament. He gradually became weaker and weaker, and on the morning of Sunday, the 24th of August, he breathed his last. His remains were conveyed to his home at Whitby for interment, where they were attended to their last resting place by many of the leading men of Canada. He was a serious loss to Whitby and its neighbourhood, the prosperity of which he had done more than any other man of his time to advance. He was also mourned as a public loss by the Party to which he had all his life been attached, and glowing eulogies were pronounced upon his character and public spirit, even by persons to whom he had always been politically opposed.
Judge Wilson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the 22nd of September, 1814. He received his education there, and emigrated to this country in the summer of 1830, when he had not quite completed his sixteenth year. He settled in the township of Trafalgar, in the county of Halton, Canada West, where he took charge of the mills and store of his maternal uncle, the late Mr. George Chalmers, who represented the constituency in the Legislative Assembly. He developed high capacity for mercantile pursuits, in which he was engaged for somewhat more than three years. He, however, resolved to devote himself to the legal profession, and in the month of January, 1834, was articled to the late Hon. Robert Baldwin Sullivan, a gentleman whose name is well known in the Parliamentary and Judicial history of this Province, and who was then a partner of the Hon. Robert Baldwin, the style of the firm being Baldwin & Sullivan. Mr. Wilson completed his studies in that office, and in Trinity Term of the year 1839 was called to the Bar of Upper Canada. On the 1st of January, 1840, he entered into partnership with Mr. Baldwin, and the connection between them endured until the end of 1849, when Mr. Baldwin retired from professional pursuits. On the 28th of November, 1850, he was appointed a Queen's Counsel by the Baldwin-Lafontaine Government, contemporaneously with the present Judges Hagarty and Gwynne, and with the late Judge Connor and Chancellor Vankoughnet. During the same year he became a Bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada.