and the personal dispute between the two was bound, as Keene saw, to be something of a "lark." That was the pity of it.

At the trial itself Whistler certainly enjoyed himself. He was more than a match for the Attorney-General, and his famous reply to one of his questions has passed into history:

"Can you tell me," asked Sir John Holker, "how long it took you to knock off that nocturne ? "

"Two days," replied Whistler.

"The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?"

"No. I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."

It is curious that Holker, with a hundred guineas on his brief, should have risked such a foolish gibe against so clever a man, but I fancy the whole of his crossexamination was really directed to allow the witness to exhibit to the jury his conceit and self-infatuation, qualities which, coupled with his eccentric appearance, were bound to tell in mitigation of damages, which was all that Holker expected.

Rossetti, Albert Moore, and W. G. Wills gave evidence for the Plaintiff. Burne-Jones, Frith, and Tom Taylor -a curious trinity-testified for Ruskin.

That Ruskin should have called Frith as a witness was remarkable. An amusing incident occurred in his crossexamination when he concurred in the description of Turner's snowstorm at sea as seen from the Harwich boat, as "soapsuds and whitewash," and observed that his latest pictures were as insane as the people who admired them.

Ruskin himself has told us how years ago poor Turner at his father's house sat in a corner murmuring to himself, "Soapsuds and whitewash," again and again. "At last," says Ruskin, “I went to him asking him why he minded what they said. Then he burst out, Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea is like? I wish they had been in it!""

Ruskin might have remembered this incident before he fell foul of the "Rocket at Cremorne.”

The details of the trial are well reported in Pennell's "Life of Whistler," and the artist printed his own. inimitable account of the proceedings. The result was a farthing damages, and Baron Huddlestone ordered each party to pay their own costs. Ruskin's admirers subscribed his costs, and Whistler wrote to his solicitors suggesting that he too should have a subscription, adding with undiminished humour," and in the event of a subscription I would willingly contribute my mite."

Ruskin, who was in broken health, took the verdict very seriously and wrote to Liddell to resign his Art Professorship at Oxford on November 28th:

The result of the Whistler trial," he says, "leaves me no further option. I cannot hold a chair from which I have no power of expressing judgment without being taxed for it by British Law."

Whistler, who, already on the verge of insolvency, was badly injured by the trial and its inconclusive result, solaced himself with pleasant epigrams at his opponent's expense, the best and worthiest of remembrance being perhaps the witty saying: "A life passed among pictures

makes not a painter-else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself."

To the outer world the trial was a storm in a teapot— a trivial personal dispute between two great men, and the smaller fry chuckled to find that these giants could lose their temper and fling language at each other like men of commoner clay.

But to each individual it was a serious quarrel on a serious subject, though the disputants could not get judge, jury, or populace to understand it. The dispute remains undetermined and the riddle remains unsolved. Whether the Cave man and the child are really trying with soul and conscience to tell us the whole outward and inward truth of the subject etched on a bone or scrawled on a slate, or whether they are merely expressing decorative personal impressions of their own emotions about the subjects they deal with—that was roughly the cause of action between Whistler and Ruskin.

The British jury assessed the commercial importance of the proposition at a farthing, but to lovers of art it remains one of the deep, unanswered problems of the universe.

In the catalogue of the Pennell-Whistler collection in the Library of Congress at Washington there is an entry :

5. Complete Brief for the Plaintiff. Whistler. marked with Serjeant Parry's fee of thirty guineas." To that case has recently been added the "complete brief” of Sir John Holker. It is strange to think that these two sets of papers, once lying next each other on the desk in Westminster Hall, should come together again in such different surroundings. Once munitions of war in a fierce

struggle for the supremacy of conflicting ideals, they rest for ever in their museum tomb across the seas within sound of the song of Hiawatha :

"Buried was the bloody hatchet,

Buried was the dreadful war-club,
Buried were all war-like weapons,

And the war-cry was forgotten."

Chapter VIII: Concerning Mr. Justice Maule

E

ULOGISTS of Sir William Henry Maule have sought to satisfy posterity that he was some

kind of a great man; but that was far from being the case. He was a learned judge-indeed, within the curtilage of the Courts all judges are ex officio learned judges and by the courtesy of the Press the epithet obtains in obituary notices; but he was not a great judge. He was certainly a shrewd judge and a studious scholar; but his title to remembrance among the members of his profession is not that he was a great man, but rather that he was a great character. His very moderate success at the Bar has been attributed by friendly critics to a want of sycophancy. He was always "blowing up his attorney," and the wretched fellow rebelled. As a matter of hard fact, attorneys rather like being kicked and cuffed by their counsel-if he is a big enough man. Russell knew the secret of this; but Maule was not a Russell.

On the Bench the pithy common sense of his legal decisions, though very recognisable to any who care to turn over the dry pages of "Clark and Finnelly " and " Manning and Granger," are long forgotten and overwhelmed in the memories and traditions of the wit and irony with which he illumined the dullest wrangles in the Common