SOME LAWYERS
Dim enough now is the memory of the Parnell Commission. There are few
who, without reference to record, could give an intelligent summary of
the findings of the unhappy judges whom political exigency condemned for
over a year to take “evidence” concerning a vast amount of miscellaneous
matter incapable of legal proof.
But from the general vagueness of that dreary inquiry there still stand
out in sharp and abrupt relief two main figures. One is that of an ageing
man, bald and bowed, of a threadbare respectability; respectability,
indeed, is the only real thing about him, and to that god he is presently
to make the last sacrifice. Richard Pigott was not, one imagines,
a specially bad man. But, unfortunately for himself, there was the
necessity for him and his to live respectably, and his situation and
endowments did not permit him to live at once respectably and honestly.
He had no kind of settled calling behind the wall of which he could
fruitfully cultivate such small talents as he possessed. In a shop or an
office he might have carried his little battle of life to the point where
one may at least make terms of dignity with Death. But he had strayed
into one of the dangerous trades. Journalism abounds in perils to all
men; it is quite fatal to the man who lacks both scruple and ability.
Richard Pigott was a bravo with the parts of a small shopkeeper. One
of Fagin’s pupils let others take the risks and glory of burglary; his
specialty was the “Kinchin Lay,” or snatching pence out of the hands
of small children. Pigott belonged to the “kinchin lay” of political
journalism; his business was that of furtive slander and timid lying.
He was only used by his employers for jobs which bigger if not more
scrupulous men would disdain; and as these jobs were neither numerous nor
lucrative he had sunk in middle life to all sorts of miserable stratagems
to keep his small pot boiling. On such service, however, or the pretence
of it, Pigott acquired a certain standing with propagandist auxiliaries
of the Unionist Party, and was eventually employed to collect evidence
connecting Parnellism with crime. He was paid a guinea a day; expenses
were liberally defrayed, and for the first time for many years the poor
hack found himself in clover. During a considerable period he enjoyed
himself at first-class hotels in Ireland, Great Britain, and on the
Continent. But as time went on his patrons, disappointed with the tame
and inconclusive character of the “evidence,” hinted that something much
more sensational was wanted, or supplies would be stopped. Pigott saw
before him a new plunge, perhaps this time without hope of re-emergence,
into the penury from which he had momentarily escaped. The prospect was
too bleak, and he decided that, whatever happened, his employers must be
satisfied, and the essential something must be supplied. So he forged
certain letters purporting to be written by Mr. Parnell—letters which, if
genuine, would have proved Parnell’s privity to the Phœnix Park murders,
and branded him as a man merely infamous. These letters had been printed
in facsimile as Parnell’s; they were supported by all the prestige of a
great newspaper; and probably a majority of people in this country still
believed they were really Parnell’s when Richard Pigott first stood up to
face the cross-examination of Sir Charles Russell.
Those who sat through that cross-examination will never forget it. It
is usual to describe such a spectacle as dramatic, and in a sense this
spectacle was. It was, however, the drama not of the theatre, with its
surprises and quick alternations, but of one of those gigantesque novels
of Victor Hugo which depict some devoted wretch overwhelmed by the slow
march of an unrelenting destiny. For two days Pigott saw closing round
him, thread by thread and mesh by mesh, the net from which death was the
sole escape. At first he was moderately glib and composed. But as the
cross-examination proceeded the miserable man showed in the contortion
of his features, in a brow dank with perspiration, in whitened face and
trembling limb, the agony that oppressed him. It was a sight to awaken
compassion even in those who had suffered most from his villainy. In his
easiest moments Sir Charles Russell was sufficiently formidable. “A more
frigid-looking man,” says his Irish biographer, “it had never been my
fortune to behold.” His eyes were of the kind that take in everything and
give out nothing; in one mood they seemed to search the very soul of his
interlocutor, in another they were capable of the kind of ferocity that
has the effect of physical shock. It is said that an unfortunate suitor
lost his wits at the glare of Jeffreys, and those who had to do with
Russell could find no great difficulty in believing the legend.
Not a few judges, fenced round with scarlet dignity, felt the terror of
Russell’s manner, and as for the solicitors who brought him briefs, “the
way he treated them,” says a contemporary, “won’t bear repeating.” Those
who knew him best declared that his roughly imperious manner concealed
a kind heart. But there was no cross-examiner at the Bar whose very
personality was more likely to strike awe into the heart of a witness
with something on his conscience. His strong features—there was something
a little sinister in their expression, the effect, so far as I remember
him, of a very decisive nose just a little out of the straight—could wear
a positively terrifying expression; it was hard to say whether his voice
was most deadly when it sank to a menacing whisper or when it boomed
out in tones of thunder; but above all there was the sense almost of an
elemental force, as resistless and unrelenting as the bog which engulfs
the incautious traveller.
There is no need to describe in detail how the wretched Pigott, entrapped
and bedevilled till there was no possible escape, broke down under that
pitiless torture, made confession during the adjournment of the court,
fled the country, and finally ended his earthly troubles with a suicide’s
bullet. But those two days, in the words of Lord Rosebery, brought
Russell at a bound “from a solid reputation to supreme eminence.” Russell
was not exaggerating when, in his subsequent speech for Parnell, he
claimed to have reversed the whole position, placing in the dock those
who had so far been the prosecutors. “When I opened this case, my lords,”
he began in low conversational tones, “I represented the accused.” Then,
suddenly allowing his voice to reach its full volume, and pointing a
minatory finger to the place occupied by the Attorney-General—Sir Richard
Webster—he cried, “Now we are the accusers, and the accused are there.”
It was a moment of intense drama. There was little in what was said.
But the manner and the effect were marvellous; the whole thing was a
triumph, not of eloquence, or of intellect, but of that mysterious force
we call personality. Russell, indeed, was no great orator, even in the
law courts, and as a political speaker he was very far from successful.
But he was, in his own proper way, a great person, and something akin
to genius enabled him to achieve, with less obvious endowments than
many other lawyers—for he was wholly deficient in wit, and was not
exceptionally subtle, or exceptionally learned, or exceptionally gifted
in words—a position as an advocate unequalled in his time. During the
Nineties his earning capacity was far beyond that of any other lawyer. As
early as 1874, when little more than forty, he was making an income of
over ten thousand a year; after the triumph of the Parnell Commission the
value put on his services mounted abruptly, and in his last full year of
practice at the Bar his fees amounted to over £22,000.
It was a weakness of Russell to boast that he was a pure “Celt,” by which
he probably meant a pure Irishman. But he was really of Anglo-Norman
ancestry, the descendant of one Robert de Rosel who accompanied Strongbow
on the expedition which brought Ireland under the English Crown. His
family was in comfortable circumstances, devoutly Catholic, and inclined
to things of the mind. Of the children only Charles followed a secular
career. His brother Matthew rose to distinction in the Society of Jesus;
his three sisters became nuns. There is a story that the two boys were
once cut off by the rising tide in Carlingford Lough. Matthew prayed;
Charles whistled. The whistle was heard, and the boys were rescued.
But Charles Russell would at no time have suggested that the appeal to
human aid was more efficacious than the prayer. For he was, in his own
way, not less devout than his brother the Jesuit. The great advocate,
gorged with suitors’ gold, the politician for whom Mr. Gladstone strained
every nerve to secure the Lord Chancellorship, the man of pleasure so
well known wherever horses ran or cards were played, was in many ways a
very different person from the Belfast solicitor of the Fifties and the
struggling barrister of the early Sixties. But his religion remained a
constant with Russell, and, though it was a shock to him to find his
daughter, like her aunts, determined to take the veil, he accepted the
situation with grace, and his letter yielding to her wishes was as
tender and delicately expressed a renunciation of a father’s natural
hopes as can be found in the language. His religious bias was rather
quaintly illustrated in his views on divorce, not so much on the thing
itself as on the attitude of parties towards it. He had no objection to
a woman seeking relief from the Courts; but he thought she ought to wear
black when doing so. He was always annoyed by a gaily dressed petitioner.
“They may not be sorry,” he used to say, “but they should at least
pretend they are sorry.”
Russell’s fame as an advocate wholly overshadowed his reputation as a
politician. He was twice Attorney-General; he had a place of importance
in the inner councils of the Liberal Party; and he spoke with industry
and intelligence wherever he was wanted to speak. But he was not at
his happiest either in the House of Commons or on the platform. With
fellow-members of Parliament he was too haughty, and with popular
audiences too cold and formal, and his mind had neither the breadth nor
the geniality for the part either of a statesman or a demagogue. But as
Lord Chief Justice he notably falsified the saying that a great advocate
seldom makes a great judge. Some of his faults of manner remained. He
was sometimes a little arbitrary, and often not a little rough. But he
had the one great quality of getting straight, through all kinds of
incidental and irrelevant matter, at the heart of a case; and the trial
of Dr. Jameson showed his iron disregard for mere popularity. Standing
between the Jury and public opinion, he permitted them no loophole for a
verdict of acquittal. Four years afterwards he said: “Public opinion was
apparently exasperated because any sentence had been passed at all. When
I tried them people said I was too hard on them. Now people say I was not
hard enough.” Lord Russell as a judge and a Peer turned to account the
considerable knowledge of the seamy side of business life he acquired in
his early years as a solicitor and as an advocate appearing chiefly in
commercial suits, and one of his latest acts was the introduction of a
Bill to deal with the evil of secret commissions. “He was struck down,”
wrote a great lawyer after his death, “before the full measure of his
powers as a law reformer and administrator could be felt.”
Essentially a man of action, finding little solace in literature or
art, his amusements were of the more frivolous kind. He was fond of
racing, boxing, theatres, and billiards, and had a passion for cards that
sometimes made him indifferent in what company he played. On one occasion
this habit exposed him to a cutting retort. A young Guardsman staying
at the same hotel had been asked to make one of a hand at whist. But
Russell, whose partner he was, soon found that the soldier was very drunk
indeed. He bore for a while the erratic play, but at last threw down his
hand, exclaiming, “This is not whist; it is tomfoolery.” The Guardsman,
quite unabashed, told him to “keep his hair on.” Any kind of familiarity
was intolerable to Russell, and this insolence at once threw him into
a towering rage. “Do you know who I am, sir?” he demanded, with that
savage glare that had frightened so many reluctant witnesses. But the
soldier faced him as coolly as he would have done a battery. “Know you!
Of course I do. But remember, my man, you’re not in your silly old police
court now.” This was precisely the kind of answer which left Russell
helpless. For, though his tastes were a little ordinary and his manner
rather rough, he was incapable of the verbal coarseness which is in some
cases the only rational alternative to silence. Anything savouring of
brutality or looseness was intolerable to him, and it is said that nobody
ever dared twice to tell a doubtful story in his presence. He contributed
little to the jollity of the Bar mess on circuit, and in ordinary society
was inclined to silence, though he could occasionally tell well enough a
story of the kind he liked.
Mr. Balfour is credited with saying once that if he and Lord Randolph
Churchill had gone to the Bar they must have made forty thousand a
year instead of the twenty thousand or so which then represented the
high-watermark of forensic success. Few would go so far as to make such
a claim. But most people must sometimes have wondered, in watching the
great barrister in an unfamiliar environment, how much of his eminence
is due to sheer intellect. Certainly very few high reputations in the
Courts are increased in politics, and those barristers who do succeed in
the House of Commons are generally rather lightly regarded in the Law
Courts. Lord Russell was an example of the great lawyer who is also a
great personality but is hardly a man of great general elevation. His
mind, though vigorous and acute, was essentially narrow; the sap of
his intellect was directed almost exclusively to things immediate and
practical. On all general questions he lagged behind the opinion of his
time. Thus, though he early took a keen interest in Irish politics, and
in his later years seldom spoke on anything but Home Rule, his conversion
to that cause did not ante-date Mr. Gladstone’s. He had always held that,
if Home Rule was necessary, it must come gradually through extensions
of local government, but he did not regard it as necessary. Yet he had
no difficulty in following Mr. Gladstone when the split came. The truth
was that, considered from a worldly point of view, he was mainly a
professional man, with professional ambitions and professional thoughts,
and politics were to him, rather more than to most lawyers, a means of
rounding off his career as an advocate. At the same time, he had no
small share of the temperament that made so many of his family embrace
a religious life. Money and position were realities; so was religion;
other things were less real. It is a temperament puzzling to people in
Protestant countries, who understand neither the griping materialism
of the Papist peasant nor the scarcely less materialistic mysticism of
the Papist peasant’s brother who happens to be a saint. But it is a
temperament very Irish, and Russell, though his frigidity made him most
unlike the “typical” Irishman of our conceptions, was an Irishman to the
core.
* * * * *
Lord Russell’s contemporary and rival, Sir Richard Webster, who succeeded
him as Lord Chief Justice under the title of Lord Alverstone, was in
every way his opposite. Russell had personality and a touch of genius;
Webster was wholly destitute of atmosphere. Russell often carried judge
and jury with him by sheer momentum; with Webster it was dogged that did
it. Russell, if not excessively Irish on the surface, was, for good or
ill, wholly un-English in any part of him; Webster was a most authentic
specimen of the Englishman in his least exciting aspect. He was the
kind of man who has always been a source of splendid strength to this
country—the man who can ever be depended on to do good, honest, sterling
work, and is never under suspicion of dangerous brilliance. Whether the
task be trying a murderer, or ruling an Eastern province, or running
a civil service department, or writing a column for _Punch_, it is to
men like Webster that our confidence is mainly given, and we are never
really easy unless they are in a majority. Webster happened to go in for
law, his family circumstances tending that way. But when Lord Salisbury
suddenly brought him into politics, making him a law officer before he
had a seat in the House of Commons, he at once attained the same sort of
success in Parliament that he had achieved at the Bar. If he had gone
from Trinity College, Cambridge, to Trichinopoly, it would have been the
same. Such men as Webster never fail, even as comic singers. Webster sang
a very excellent comic song, and would often do so in congenial company,
even after he had reached the Bench. And he ran a capital mile race, was
great over hurdles, played a good game of cricket, cycled much when the
bicycle was out of fashion, and to the end of his life read the sporting
papers with at least as much interest as the _Law Times_.
In a word, there was much health in him, and quite as much ability
as he wanted for his purpose. The one thing he lacked was a touch of
distinction. That horrible word “level-headed” was not inapplicable
to him. If Webster was never, in any circumstances, below a certain
standard, he paid the penalty of never rising above it. Nobody ever
said, nobody ever did, fewer notable things. He had some very big jobs
as an advocate: he led for the Crown before the Parnell Commission; he
prosecuted Jabez Balfour, the Liberator swindler; he prosecuted the
authors of the Jameson Raid; he served as junior to Russell in the
Behring Sea arbitration; and he was leading counsel for this country in
the Venezuela arbitration. The praise showered on him for his conduct of
these great international cases was undoubtedly deserved. But the quality
of the praise is worth notice. “The care and preciseness with which
he prepared the cases,” says an authority, “bore traces of tremendous
labour. Unlike the American lawyers, who dealt principally in general
propositions, Webster advanced no point that could not be legally
supported and defended.” Webster was, in fact, an almost perfect specimen
of the matter-of-fact British lawyer who, having a complete contempt
for first principles, and a vast reverence for precedent and punctilio,
is “greatly trusted and respected by solicitors.” He was helped by a
ponderously earnest and almost prayerful manner, which suggested that
a certain moral obliquity, and an element not quite English, you know,
resided with the side opposed to him.
* * * * *
If Sir Richard Webster had been just a little more “English,” a good deal
less able, and far less learned, he might have made another Mr. Justice
Grantham. There was just the sort of resemblance between the two men
that obtains between a first-rate portrait and a very wild and wicked
caricature. Both were intensely Conservative, intensely respectable,
intensely unimaginative, intensely moral and well-meaning. But Mr.
Justice Grantham, like necessity, knew no law, while Lord Alverstone knew
a great deal; and Lord Alverstone had the judicial temperament in full
measure, while Mr. Justice Grantham could not, without severe mental
discomfort, listen to more than one side of a case. His ordinary course
was to take a glance at both litigants; that was generally sufficient,
but if both seemed equally objectionable he might be impelled to take
sides according as he liked or disliked counsel. Taking a side was
quite necessary to him. I remember one case in which he suffered, for
quite a little time, the agonies of choice. The issue lay between an
Englishman who had become some sort of heathen and a naturally black and
heathen man. As an intensely religious English gentleman Sir William
Grantham was bound to disapprove very strongly of anybody who threw
away the advantages of having been born a “happy English child.” But at
least equally he did not like colour. For about a quarter of an hour
his bosom was torn by conflicting feelings; then he made up his mind
that the calls of blood were paramount, and for the rest of the hearing
went strongly against the hapless dark-skinned litigant. Judicially Sir
William Grantham was simply the Great Reversible. Personally he was an
extraordinarily good-hearted man, and those who had least respect for
his judicial qualities were among his warmest friends. There was not a
dry eye in the Law Courts when it became known that he had been called
before the highest of all tribunals.
* * * * *
A very different type of lawyer was Sir Francis Jeune, the famous
President of the Divorce Court. A handsome, bearded man, with features
of a slightly Semitic cast, and courtly manners not quite English—he
was born in Jersey, though little of his life had been spent there—he
was, both professionally and socially, one of the best-known figures
of the Nineties. His wife, the widow of a Peer’s younger son, was a
great entertainer, and her fondness for everything either “smart” or
intellectual was a considerable factor in breaking down the barriers
which still existed between “the classes” and mere talent or mere money.
Judges seldom make much figure in society; and in the Nineties there
still clung to them as a class much of that Bohemian character which
derived from the days when Circuit duty implied a lengthy banishment
from London and a rough bachelor life in the Assize towns. Mr. Justice
Hawkins, later Lord Brampton, was not perhaps quite typical of his
brethren, and the exaggerated untidiness of Lord Justice Vaughan
Williams was exceptional. But not less exceptional was the combination
of scholarliness and mondaine aplomb of Sir Francis Jeune. As a divorce
judge he had a perfect style; it could hardly have been beaten by the
bedside manner of a Royal physician. It was a delight to hear him
interpreting the degree of affection implied in a wife’s reference to
her husband as “my dear little black piggie.” No man was more apt in
discussing the psychology of sex. In one case he showed, by a wealth of
refined analysis and historical allusion, how while it was quite possible
for a man to be in love with two women at the same time, and leave each
in the belief that she was the sole mistress of his heart, no woman
was capable of such liberality or such dissimulation. He was a great
advocate of temporary separation as a possible cure for ills matrimonial;
“absence,” he held, “often made the heart grow wiser.” A rigid moralist
might have ventured the criticism that the delightful man-of-the-world
way in which Sir Francis dealt with suits and suitors was prejudicial
to the interests of marriage; a divorce as managed by him seemed so
entirely ordinary and innocent an affair. But, suave as he was, he could
be strong on occasion, and he once committed a Duchess to prison with
the most perfect and relentless good breeding. Ordinarily he shunned the
rôle of judicial humorist; Mr. Justice Darling was then a very young
judge, and the older jesters were of the coarser genre. But occasionally
a good thing came out accidentally. Thus it was once pointed out that he
had joined in prayers at the Archbishops’ Court, whose competence was
impugned in the case then being argued. “Yes,” said Sir Francis, “but I
prayed without prejudice.”
* * * * *
The name of Lord Coleridge has a very far-away sound; yet, though he was
born in 1820 and called in 1847, he was still a great figure in the early
Nineties. It was a majestic sight to see him rise sweepingly from the
Bench at the close of a sitting. He was six feet three in height, erect
and sturdy, though not corpulent, and this tall column of manhood was
crowned by an appropriately noble capital; his head was large and finely
shaped, and his features, while strong and significant, were suffused
with a benignancy of expression which might be occasionally misleading.
For he could say very nasty things in his gentle and delicately modulated
voice—a voice the beauty of which Sir Charles Russell had never known
surpassed. As a cross-examiner he had shown deadly power in his days of
advocacy. The smashing of the Tichborne pretender had been one of his
great forensic feats; during the larger part of the cross-examination
his drift was not generally appreciated, but when he sat down the fraud
was completely unmasked, and at the subsequent trial for perjury it was
found that Coleridge had, in the words of a commentator, “stopped all
the earths.” He died in the spring of 1894, after over twenty years in
the great post of Lord Chief Justice. He was undoubtedly a very great
judge, but, being on a large scale all round, his faults were not exactly
small. His temper was despotic, his language could be bitter, he had
many dislikes, and was at once subtle and indiscreet. A fondness for
society, going with a disposition to fall foul of many units in society,
naturally led to many collisions, and he was as constant in his feuds as
in his friendships. Even in his old age he could, if the matter were of
sufficient importance, rouse himself to great mental efforts. But those
who saw him presiding over his Court in the early Nineties were chiefly
conscious of dignified somnolence, and the alertness and vitality of his
successor, Russell, seemed almost indecent after the repose that had
reigned so long.
Lord Coleridge was one of those lawyers who retain their political
prejudices in unmitigated form after translation to the Bench; he was
to the last as dogmatic a Liberal as Grantham was a Conservative. Thus
in 1892 he wrote to a correspondent, “I am out of politics, of course,
but I would go far and do much to destroy the Unionists. To them and
them alone is due coercion and all the train of evils and the denial of
obvious and safe improvements in England and Scotland. I have no feeling
against the Tories; there must be such people in every old-established
and aristocratic country, and they at least are honest and act steadily
on principle. But a Unionist who pretends to be and calls himself
a Liberal, and who for seven long years has voted for everything
reactionary and entirely opposed to his creed—I have no patience with
these men.” We hear much now about the degradation of the Press. Lord
Coleridge thought the solemn London papers of the early Nineties, though
“rather better educated” than the American, “to the full as vile,” and
“with a swagger and insufferable pretence and self-assertion” from which
American journalism was free. Moreover, the “Court and aristocracy
degrade the independence and corrupt the manners of the vast numbers who
are brought within their influence.” It can be well understood that a man
holding such opinions, and expressing them with such vigour, was only
popular among those who thought with him. For the rest, Lord Coleridge
was fond of good pictures, good music, good living, and good stories. He
was not himself the hero of many anecdotes, but one may serve. He was
sitting in Court with Mr. Justice Groves one day when a slip of paper was
handed up to the Bench conveying the news of a most unexpected judicial
appointment. Groves exclaimed, “Well, I _am_ damned.” “My learned
brother,” said Coleridge, “I do not indulge in profane language myself,
but if you would repeat that word it would really relieve my mind.”
* * * * *
No survey of the legal landscape of the Nineties would be complete
without some reference to that most individual figure, Sir Frank
Lockwood. Of middle-class Yorkshire birth, Lockwood inherited from his
father a facility in caricature and from his mother a keen sense of
humour. He was meant for the Church, and sent to Cambridge with orders
in view. But his lively nature rebelled against this decorous career,
and after he had taken his degree and spent a little time in tutoring he
decided to go to the Bar. His first case was a formal appearance to give
consent on the part of a certain corporation; the fee was three guineas
for the brief and one guinea for consultation. A rather testy judge
remarked on the unnecessarily large number of counsel appearing. “You,
sir,” he demanded, turning to Lockwood, “what are you here for?” “Three
and one, m’lud; merely three and one,” was the soft answer, which did not
turn away judicial wrath, but did attract professional attention to the
young barrister.
Lockwood is a singular and almost unique example of a barrister making
a very creditable success by abandoning himself frankly to the very
side of his temperament which would seem least likely to help him in
so grave a profession. He throve on a studied light-heartedness. His
parts were not specially quick; he had a fundamental common-sense, but
little more, and if he had taken himself quite seriously it is likely the
legal world would have taken him quite lightly. But it was not easy for
judges or witnesses or jurymen to resist the fascination of his cheery
presence and genial humour. His jokes were always cracked with a shrewd
eye to business, and many of them would not have sounded very amusing
outside a court of justice. But they were above the ordinary level of
forensic humour, and there came to be a recognised “Lockwood brief.” The
character of a jester was also useful as leading to a wide journalistic
renown. “Lockwood’s latest” went the rounds as merrily as the sparkling
witticisms of the facetious lodger of Mrs. Todgers. The paragraphists
were delighted to narrate how Lockwood, seeing a Scottish host sign for
himself and his wife in the traditional Highland way, “Cluny and Mrs.
McPherson,” himself wrote, “26, Lennox Gardens, S.W., and Mrs. Lockwood.”
With equal glee they told how Mr. Lockwood went to a chapel where his
Nonconformist friend, Mr. Samuel Danks Waddy, Q.C., was advertised to
give a brief, bright, and brotherly address, and how Waddy turned the
tables on him by solemnly giving out that “Brother Lockwood would now
lead in prayer.”
“It amuses my friends very much,” said Mr. Peter Magnus when telling
Mr. Pickwick that his initials were P.M., and that in notes to intimate
friends he sometimes signed himself “Afternoon.” Mr. Pickwick was
secretly “envious of the ease with which Mr. Magnus’s friends were
amused,” and no doubt a professional merry-maker must have sighed over
the inexpensive triumphs of Sir Frank Lockwood. But the thing did what
it was intended to do, and on the strength of his caricatures and his
jokes, far more than by any conspicuous ability, Lockwood climbed to a
Recordership, a seat in Parliament, a good social position, and finally
the Solicitor-Generalship.
His early death seemed the more pathetic because of his intense enjoyment
of life and the unusual bounty with which Fate had so far treated one who
was after all but a light-weight. He had always been a little nervous
about his physical health and not a little anxious lest his professional
standing should diminish. Thinking thus, he had his eye on the Bench.
Lord Halsbury, whose professional sympathies were even stronger than his
political prejudices, was favourable, and called on him during the last
month of his life. But it was too plainly evident that Lockwood’s course
was run, and the well-meaning visit could have no result. “He must have
felt,” said Lockwood to Mr. Birrell a day or two later, glancing at his
own wasted frame, “that I should make an excellent puisne judge.”
Lockwood’s personal opinion of litigation is perhaps worth quotation.
“Never by any chance,” he wrote to a relative, “become involved in
any difficulties which will bring you into a court of law of higher
jurisdiction than a police court. An occasional drunk and disorderly
will do you no harm and only cost you five shillings. Beyond a little
indulgence of this kind—beware.”