(8 May 1856-28 July 1904), notary and author. Born in Montreal. Parents: Hugh McLennan and his wife Isabella Stewart, who was the daughter of Neil Stewart of GC and Vankleek Hill. He graduated from McGill University (B. C. L., 1880), and was commissioned as a notary in 1881. A successful notary, he retired in 1900 with ill health; he and his family then moved to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life, travelling extensively. He was married in 1883 to Marion Paterson. (three children) He died in Fiesole, Italy. Living in the bright dawn of Canadian literature, and in one of the most hopeful boom periods of Canadian nationalism, he was a successful and prolific author, producing poems, short stories, novels and other works, as well as translations from French. He was not a Glengarrian by birth or residence, but he wrote one of the better known GC books, the historical novel Spanish John (New York & London, 1898), which retells the adventurous story of a real-life Jacobite, John Macdonell, called Spanish John, who with a number of his relatives was important in the GC area in the early days of settlement. (See the entry for Macdonell in this dictionary for Macdonell’s own memoirs, drawn on by McLennan.) The novel is dedicated “To my father this result of long talks over old days old manners, and old memories.” With regard to its place in the sequence of GC novels, the Spanish John novel, it may be noted, appears just before the first of the GC novels of Ralph Connor (C. W. Gordon), and it anticipates the practice of Carrie Holmes MacGillivray in the 1920s and Grace Campbell in the 1940s of introducing real historical figures into their fiction. The McLennann ovel Spanish John was first published by instalments in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, beginning with the issue of Oct. 1897, with many fine illustrations by F. De Myrbach, well reproduced.

His life by Leslie G. Monkman, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. XIII * Morgan (1898) 751, 1117 * Campbell, Tannis, & Stewart, MacDougalls, 182-183 * Dumbrille, B, 32-43 * MacGillivray & Ross 653 * his death remembered, 20 Years Ago column, Cornwall Freeholder 7 Aug. 1924