to have passed out of meaning.) But mystifica-
tion is always a dangerous game, unless played
with consummate tact — of which Stott had not a
particle. For, with all his apparent complexity, he
was really as simple, and, to those whom he failed
to mystify, as transparently simple, as a child.
He had entered St. John's College, Cambridge :
and had he remained there would probably have
done well, for he was a good scholar. But his
fastidious taste — or, shall I say, that malignant
fairy ? — impelled him to migrate to Magdalene ;
no
Stott's College Career
him, a man with no means to spare, to what was
at that time essentially a rich man's college ; a
man to whom a good degree was imperatively
necessary from studious and economical St. John's
to a small college no less distinguished — of course
I am speaking of now ancient history — for the
opposite qualities. And thereupon ensued
another error. From out of all the classical
" coaches " in Cambridge he selected Calverley.
No doubt Charles Stuart Calverley, of Christ's,
was the most brilliant of them all, as nobody can
need to be told. It was not, however, a wit,
a humorist, a man whose own brilliancy could
take care of itself without trouble and presume a
like ability in others, that his pupil required, but
a tutor of the exacting sort, who would spare
neither them nor himself in getting the best and
utmost out of his men. A financial strain, inevit-
able under such conditions, brought him to seek
literary or tutorial work in London without being
able to wait for a degree. Some of his surviving
Cambridge contemporaries, who would be some-
what older than mine, may perhaps recollect
" Agag" Stott, so called because something about
his gait on King's Parade seemed suggestive of
the King of Amalek, who "came delicately."
It is on record that Calverley once laid a wager
that he would get fastidious and elaborately
III
Mid-Victorian Memories
attired Stott of Magdalene to promenade that
same parade, on a given day, at its most
frequented hour of the afternoon, carrying a
cabbage. It seemed impossible that he should
win ; but the tidings of the bet had spread abroad,
and at the given hour of the appointed day the
Parade was thronged. Punctually to the time,
" Agag " Stott picked his way through the
throng, ostentatiously holding a cabbage in both
hands. Calverley had hedged by betting Stott
that he would not carry a cabbage along King's
Parade.
When I knew him he was reviewing fiction
for the Echo, under the editorship of Arthur
Arnold, and more general literature for the
Economist under that of Walter Bagehot ; and
on the establishment of the Graphic he was
engaged in the former capacity there. Between
the first and last of these services he was
appointed editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, but
was back in London within a little more than
a year. There again I think I see the malignant
fairy's hand, for he was not merely no man
of business ; he was incapable of realising that
a newspaper has to concern itself with other
matters than literature and philosophy, and that
even these have their indispensable business side.
But though not intended by Nature either for
112
Stott as a Reviewer
an editor or for any other position demanding
energetic and decisive action, a more able or
trustworthy reviewer there could not be. No
doubt he had more time, in our more leisurely
days, than he could have found in these for
ensuring to every book that came to him the
justice of a thorough reading, with a thorough
thinking over to follow ; but, as myself a reviewer
both of those days and of these, I may have
more to say on this subject before I have done.
Nor was his thinkinor confined to his current
work. Thought was his business, precisely as
it had been Hobbes of Malmesbury's. The com-
parison never occurred to me till this moment ;
but it is peculiarly apt, in so far at least as both
were mainly occupied with the same class of
questions, and were entirely alike in the logical
severity of their conclusions. And here I come
to the sadness of the whole matter — that one
whose thought was at once so subtle and so
sincere, so well based on wide reading and yet
so independent of its base, should have left
behind him — Nothing. He had a notion of
some day writing a history of his opinions — it
must have been interesting, as the story of the
making of a mind, and otherwise of critical
and perhaps philosophic value. But it was never
begun, and, I am quite sure, never would have
I 113
Mid- Victorian Memories
been begun even had he been alive to-day. He,
as it were, evaporated in talk, seldom eloquent,
but always lucid, vigorous, and overflowing with
fresh suggestion. And it was really talk, not
monologue, for he rejoiced in a well-fought
battle : well-fought-out too, for a talk that had
begun, say, with dinner at the Cock (the historic
and Tennysonian Cock : not its modernised con-
tinuation over the way) or the Solferino in Soho,
might continue till past sunrise, and then be not
ended but adjourned.
Our arguments were by no means always of
a serious order, however seriously conducted.
They were often of the nature of the " Quod-
libets " ; the questions with which the disciples
of the Schoolmen used to amuse their ingenuity.
If we never tackled the celebrated, if supposi-
titious, example of what such a thing might be,
" How many angels can dance upon the point
of a needle ? " it was certainly not because of its
being outside the range of our speculations.
Poetry, too, came in for a great deal of talk,
and Browning, in especial, had no more thorough
devotees. Music, however, ran all else very hard
indeed. We were not the least in advance of
our times. While we believed whole-heartedly
in the eternal supremacy of Beethoven, whom
we held to be Music's utmost and final utterance,
114
Fanatici per la Musica
we had a truly mid- Victorian passion for the
Opera of our mid-Victorian time. Scarcely a
week passed, during the season — then a regular
period, from Easter till when the grouse sum-
moned Parliament to rise — that did not, once
at least, find us patiently suffocating in the
abominable atmosphere that led to the gallery
of one or the other of the two houses, and
thinkinof it well worth while. Well — it was
worth while, since we found it so. Being neither
musician nor musical critic, I am not qualified
to compare the present state of things with what
prevailed previously to the great Wagnerian
revolution, then only just beginning to cast its
shadow — or should I say its light ? — before. But
I cannot imagine that the most passionate music-
lover of the most intellectually advanced school
could, in the way of sincere enjoyment, surpass
us who knew nothing better than an opera of
Mozart, or Donizetti, or Rossini, or Bellini, or
Gounod, or Verdi, conducted by Costa or Arditi,
and rendered by such singers — to name a repre-
sentative few — as Titiens, Lucca, RudersdorfiC
Trebelli ; Giuglini, Graziani, Faure. It was the
music and its performance, and nothing else, that
had got into our heads when once, after hearing
Titiens as Fidelio, we walked on and on, and
talked on and on, without note of distance,
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Mid-Victorian Memories
direction, or time, till seven o'clock the next
morning suddenly brought us to our senses in
an unknown and rainy region that we found to
be Blackwall. Of the singers who had been the
favourites of an earlier time, Alboni, Grisi, and
Mario still survived. But Mario was in the
second stage of what had been said of him —
that " while he could sing he couldn't act, and
when he could act he couldn't sing." I am
certain that on one occasion — I think it was in
" Le Prophete " — he merely went through the
form of opening his mouth, moving his lips, and
extending his arms, without emitting a sound :
yet the applause of the ever-faithful British
audience could scarcely have been greater even
in his ibest days. One does not always need
corporeal ears in order to hear. My only recol-
lection of Grisi is a sad one. She had been
ill-advised enough to attempt a return to the
stage which she had quitted for many years :
and I was ill-advised enough to hear her. It
was in " Lucrezia Borgia." Not a trace of what
had given her fame remained : and it was pitiable
when, in the last act, her corpulence prevented
her from rising from her knees without far too
obvious aid. And the audience was not so
faithfully kind to her Lucrezia as it had been
to Mario's John of Leyden.
Il6
CHAPTER IX
The Oxford Circuit— Walter John Huddleston— J. J.
Powell — Henry Matthews — Dr. Kenealy — Quarter
Sessions
Called to the Bar in due course, I became an
inmate of chambers in Pump Court, Temple,
shared by the present Sir Arthur Collins, late
Chief Justice of Madras, and my friend B. T.
Williams, already mentioned in connection with
Gray's Inn, to which Collins, already a leading
junior on the Western Circuit, also belonged.
I joined the Oxford Circuit, of which Gloucester,
next to Stafford, is the principal Assize town.
The leading wearers of silk at that time were,
facile princeps, Huddleston, afterwards Baron
Huddleston, and J. J. Powell. The Junior Bar
was exceedingly strong, for it included Henry
James, afterwards Lord James of Hereford ;
Henry Matthews, afterwards Viscount Llandaff,
and sometime Home Secretary; J. O. Griffits,
whom I mention here not for the high place
he held in the esteem and confidence of solicitors
as a sound and able lawyer, but for his singular
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Mid- Victorian Memories
habit of wearing full evening dress, apparently
always brand-new, everywhere and at every
hour of every day ; Macnamara, also a favourite
Counsel of the sound and solid order ; Montagu
Williams, who might fairly be called the Prisoners'
Attorney-General, so extensively, and so success-
fully, was he employed in their defence at the
Old Bailey and elsewhere. No doubt his subse-
quent success as a police magistrate was largely
founded on his speciality at the Bar. He was
no mere lawyer — I doubt if Macnamara or
Griffits would have allowed him to be a
" lawyer " at all ; but I am unable to follow him
into the theatrical world where he was the most
thoroughly at home. It was curious to compare
his position in the criminal courts with the face,
figure, and even manner of just a good-natured
and good-tempered boy. Among my slightly
senior contemporaries was Mr. Justice Jelf: Mr.
Justice Darling and Lord Loreburn did not
become members of the Circuit till too late for
any memory of mine.
Every Circuit has, as most people know, a
social as well as a professional side : and our
Bar Mess had in Huddleston an almost ideal
Senior. His loquacity, already noted, and his
open vanities — he liked to know dukes, and to
have it known that he knew them, and after his
Ii8
Walter John Huddleston
promotion to the Bench married a duke's
daughter — might excite a smile. But it would
be a kindly smile, in sympathy with a kindly
nature. I thoroughly believe that he not only
wished but tried to make everybody round him
happy and comfortable. Some of us, between
Court and Mess, were walking with him a little
out of Stafford when we passed another of us
walking alone, " unfriended, melancholy, slow."
It was a very recently elected member of the
Mess, without any ready-made acquaintance, and
too evidently uncouth and shy to be likely to
make his own way. " How is it that is all by
himself?" asked Huddleston, to whom solitude,
as implying silence, would appeal as a dire
calamity. " Hasn't he any friends among us ?
No ? Then we must give him some." And I
am not more sure that I am writing these words
than that he took the first opportunity of saying
something kindly to in a markedly familiar
way, for others to see and hear.
Powell, his opponent in ordinary, was also his
opposite in nearly all ways save in kindliness of
nature. And in that respect there was a differ-
ence. Huddleston certainly liked to be liked
for his kindliness ; Powell, I should say, was
wholly unconscious of any such desire. I am
only noting an obvious difference — not in any
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Mid- Victorian Memories
way giving the preference to instinctive over
deliberate kindliness, or vice versa. He was
entirely without affectation. He was of a humble
origin which he never either flaunted after the
manner of some self-made men, or concealed after
that of others : and it was understood, to his
honour, that when in Gloucester at Assize time
he never neglected the kinsfolk above whose
heads he had climbed. As an advocate, he was
apt to suffer from loss of temper — a fault from
which Huddleston was wholly free ; but it was
the natural defect of his zeal for his cause. That
he spared no pains, and left as little to chance
as chance ever allows to be left, whether in
war or in law, I once had uncomfortable ex-
perience. We lodged in the same house on the
College Green, and our bedrooms adjoined. He
was next day to appear for the Crown in a trial
for murder ; and he spent the whole night in
rehearsing his opening speech to the jury with
such rhetorical energy that he robbed me of my
night's rest as well as himself of his own. It was
an odd sensation to hear repeated in Court next
morning, verbally and literally, the final revision
of the speech from which I was still suffering.
Huddleston, however, who defended, gave me
my revenge.
If I were bidden to name the ablest man I ever
120
Henry Matthews
met, I should not hesitate to fix upon Henry-
Matthews, who, as Viscount Llandafif, passed
away a few months ago in his eighty-eighth year.
And in that choice for a first place I should be
far from alone. But if I were bidden to name
the ablest man I ever knew, I should hesitate
much and long: for I strongly doubt if he was
really known by anybody at all. Below all his
geniality there was something — I know not what —
that seemed to refuse intimacy ; and in the per-
ception of that something, whatever it was, I am,
again, far from alone. It was like a perpetual
" Thus far thou shalt come, but no farther."
That he was unsurpassed as a fully equipped and
accomplished lawyer few will question ; and his
equipment was not confined to English law. As
an achievement in advocacy, his reply for the
petitioner in the Crawford case was, according to
all accounts and reports, a masterpiece of vic-
torious invective. But he was not conspicuously
successful on Circuit for sfettinof verdicts from
common juries. His subtleties of argument were
apt to fly over their heads ; he made no appeal
to their feelings, like James ; he lacked the per-
sonal impressiveness of Huddleston ; and so far
from sharing the red-hot zeal of Powell, his
manner suggested an indifference to the result, as
if his interest in his client was limited to pre-
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Mid- Victorian Memories
senting the client s case in a flawlessly logical
way. " Matthews addresses a jury as if he were
asking it for a dance," was a comment I once
heard. And the comment was not inapt, though
it may seem hazy here. But one does not dis-
parage a racehorse because . . . Well, I have
too much respect for the common jury, and too
much admiration for the special ability of those
who do know how to influence it, to continue the
comparison to its customary end.
I suppose I must not forget Dr. Kenealy, as in
some request when a slashing speech rather than
prudent strategy or scrupulous fairness was what
a case required. It is difficult, if possible, to
deprive one's mind of the light of after events in
an attempt to revive previous impressions ; but I
do not think that his conduct of the Tichborne
case came upon those who knew him as much of
a surprise. I am now disposed to describe him
as genius gone wrong ; partly perhaps through
too thorough an acceptance of Lord Brougham's
conception of the whole duty of an advocate —
to win his client's cause per fas aiit per nefas :
by fair means if he could, but if these were not
available, then by foul. Brougham, one may
hopefully assume, did not carry out his doctrine
to the whole of its practical conclusion. Indeed
he has been charged with the inconsistency of
122
Dr. Kenealy
thinking less of a client's interests than of his own
glory : notably in kis conduct of a cause cdlebre,
the trial of Queen Caroline. And that, in this
world of mixed motives, might well have been
the case with Kenealy, specially when helped by
some twist of the brain. Does the reader chance
to have ever come across that piece of wild work,
his " New Pantomime".-* If so, no further ex-
planation of " genius gone wrong " will be
required. He was, moreover, not only a fine
classical scholar, but a master of the principal
modern and Oriental languages. I am not, how-
ever, suggesting that much learning had made
him mad : the mental twist would have been
earlier than the learning. I think he must have
become a half-convinced monomaniac towards the
close of his career, deliberately employing the
unconvinced part of his own brain in bewildering
the brains of others. One is ashamed to remem-
ber the national nightmare known as the Tich-
borne claim, turning old and intimate friends into
enemies, dividing families, populating lunatic
asylums, and outraging common sense at every
point and turn. I was once at a large mixed
dinner party where a clergyman actually pro-
pounded this amazing thesis : The evidence in
favour of the claimant to the Tichborne estates is
stronger than the evidences of Christianity. But
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Mid- Victorian Memories
Christianity is true : therefore all the more is the
identity of the claimant with Roger Tichborne
true. It was certainly not without cause that I
spoke of Kenealy as bewildering other brains
than his own. Of course it may be suggested
that this particular parson cannot have had any
brains to bewilder. But the suggestion would be
wrong.
At the City (of Gloucester) and County Quarter
Sessions, both of which I regularly attended, the
ordinary leaders were Pickwickianly named
Robert Sawyer, a good fellow who, in mid-
career, inspired by all a convert's zeal, threw up
a sound and steady practice at the Bar in order
that he might devote himself to the teetotal
cause ; and George Griffiths, a successful defender
of prisoners, who possessed the invaluable art of
talking to twelve Gloucestershire jurors as if he
were just one of themselves — accent and all.
When he became totally blind, he still stuck to
his practice at Assizes and Sessions, mastering
his briefs by having them read to him — a feat
which must be well-nigh unique in professional
annals. He was not notorious for polish, and
was certainly no respecter of persons : he would
address the future Lord James of Hereford as
"Jim" ; and I have heard him invite Huddleston
himself, the associate of dukes and duchesses, to
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Quarter Sessions
drop in for a Sunday's pot-luck vvith'him and the
missis whenever in London and so disposed. A
propos of both pot-luck and teetotalism together —
it was customary for the Bar to dine with the
Magistrates one evening during the County
Sessions, One of the latter prided himself on his
skill as a brewer of punch ; and on one of these
occasions, at any rate, he displayed it by sub-
stituting ale for water. Not a drop of the feebler
fluid would he allow. The result was much
admired — at the time. That no wig covered a
headache in Court next morning I dare not
surmise.
125
CHAPTER X
"The Just Judge"— The Laiv Maonzine—Mhs Cobb-
Andrew Johnson's oath — My first story — John Blackwood
— The value of a name
My fee-book, still extant after nearly half a
century of chance and change, tells me that at
no time during my active connection with the
Bar could I describe myself as briefless; that my
fees during my first year amounted to seventy-
one pounds and eight shillings, and during my
second to ten guineas better. But then happened
what — in itself a sorrow — gradually and in-
directly, though not slowly, diverted my course
of life into directions of which I had never
dreamed.
I have not yet given my father a prominent or
frequent place in these memories. But I must
recall him now, and with affectionate pride. I
long ago mentioned him as among the first-
appointed County Court Judges. His Circuit
was extensive, comprising the three important
towns of Gloucester, Cheltenham, and Stroud,
eight other Courts in the same county, and one
126
" The Just Judge "
in Wiltshire, thus involving a considerable amount
of journey by road as well as rail. The twenty
miles from Cheltenham to Stow-on-the-Wold,
for instance, high up on the table-land of the
Cotswolds (said to be the highest market town
in England), had to be travelled by road ; and,
until antiquated notions of time and distance
were, in company with other things, smashed up
by the motor-car, twenty miles were twenty miles.
I used to think them more, crawling, as most of
them did, through a scarcely inhabited expanse,
monotonously grass-green or snow-white accord-
ing to the season, and diversified only by stone
walls, with an occasional belt of Scotch firs planted
here and there to break the sweep of the wind.
During his nineteen years of judicial office I do
not think that my father once, unless by reason
of some unavoidable accident, kept a Court wait-
ing : absence through illness I do not remember
at all. Nor during all those same nineteen years
of dealing with an annually increasing variety of
cases was there an appeal to the Superior Courts
from any decision of his, save once ; and then the
appeal was dismissed and the decision confirmed.
Confidence in the soundness of his law was
unbounded, and was amply justified by the
scrupulous care with which his judgments were
formed. In questions of fact his anxiety for
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Mid-Victorian Memories
justice was literally proverbial, for it caused him
to be popularly known as "The 'Just Judge";
and a nobler title than that is not to be conceived.
My brother and I frequently accompanied him on
his journeys ; and I sometimes grew impatient
with the way in which he would hear out what
appeared to me a transparently clear case to the
last word that either party could find to say, or
extricate the most trivial-seeming dispute from
the most hopeless-seeming tangle. He was
never in a hurry, never lost his temper, even with
the most irritating witness, thought highly of the
judicial office, and unaffectedly maintained its
dignity. Speaking of the County Court Judges
generally. Chief Justice Erie, I have been told, pro-
nounced the opinion that "some of them ought
to be sent up among us," the Judges of the
Superior Courts — " Francillon for instance."
In the summer of 1866, he, my mother, my
brother, my sister, and myself were making a
vacation tour together when he succumbed to
an attack of cholera at Ouchy, and was buried
at Lausanne. The cloisters of Gloucesu.T
Cathedral contain a window, the tribute of the
officials of his Courts to his memory. I shall not
dwell upon the nature of our journey home.
That can be imagined by any reader as readily as
it can be recalled by me. I will leave blank the
128
Income and Expenditure
few months that elapsed before my mother and
sister joined me in lodgings in London.
The last ten words are one consequence of a
serious curtailment of our united means ; for
those of my mother and sister were no more than
they needed, and I had none whatever beyond
what I might earn. It is true that my fee-book
to date was not altogether discouraging. But
the expenses of two or three Circuits and eight
distant Quarter Sessions every year, the necessary
share of chambers and a clerk in London, plus all
the hundred-and-one minor expenses — not minor
in the aggregate — that practice at the Common
Law Bar demands, rendered it exceedingly un-
likely that income could balance expenditure for
many years to come. It did not occur to me to
throw the Bar over and seek my fortune elsehow
and elsewhere. I had been trained for the Bar
almost from my cradle ; I was my father's son ;
all the ambition I ever had was bounded by, all
my associations had for years been bound up
with, the Bar. I am wrong, though. I did
make one effort to change my spots by applying
for an Inspectorship of Schools. I am fairly
confident that I should not have made a bad
Inspector, and had a sufficiently good academic
record ; but no doubt there were many with a
K 129
Mid- Victorian Memories