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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 teapota 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 :

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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

AULOGISTS 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

Pleas or Exchequer. "An Irony," says an old writer, "is a nipping jeast or a speech that hath the honey of pleasantnesse in its mouth and a sting of rebuke in its taile." Maule was a master of irony. Had he only made equal use of his other abilities he might have been remembered as a considerable advocate or even a powerful judge; but he had a gift which, in season or out of season, he was compelled to display-the gift of irony-and it is the echoes of these strange outbursts of his, coldly reported in careless memoirs or told with advantage over the mess table on circuit, that I have sought to collect and set down. For it is only in Mauleiana that you can get any true glimpse of Mr. Justice Maule.

There is a colourless book of Maule's early life written by a niece who can never, one suspects, have heard of uncle's wild flights of mockery and sarcasm. It portrays for you an industrious young man, a sort of legal curate, going through the blameless stages of a successful career. Of the early biographical material there displayed it is sufficient for our purpose to remember that Maule was born on the 25th of April, 1788, at Edmonton in Middlesex; that his father was a respectable doctor; that he was at school at his uncle's near Ealing, and afterwards commenced residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Greville was at the same school and remembers Maule's uncle as "an excellent scholar and a great brute." He also recalls a vivid picture of young Maule stimulated to further and better educational studies by being "suspended by the hair of the head while being well caned." It is notable that years afterwards Greville met Maule at a club, and went up to him where he was reading a paper

to renew the friendship of old schooldays. Maule looked up, grunted at him that it was "too long ago to talk about," and retired into his newspaper. Whereupon Greville says very shrewdly: "So I set him down for a brute like his uncle and troubled him no further." This anecdote of his ill manners is more than probable. A man who rejoices to exhibit his gifts of sarcasm and ridicule at the expense of his fellow-men is bound to have his pleasanter social traits somewhat blunted in the practice.

Two further things may be set down by way of introduction. Maule was beyond doubt a very learned mathematician. He was a personal friend of Mr. Babbage, who extols Maule's deep knowledge of his own science. He and Babbage would play a game of mental chess with each other to while away the tedium of a coach journey— a feat not possible to men of ordinary powers of memory. It is interesting to remember that in Lewis Carroll, an ironist of a different type from Maule, we have another example of a deeply scientific mathematician revelling in the expression of ludicrous antiphrasis and quaint ridicule and mockage of commonplace humanity. Mr. Dodgson had a similar faculty of memory, and would amuse his sleepless nights going through a book or two of Euclid, the figures and letters of which he could visualise in the dark. At first blush the last man you would suspect of irony would be the mathematician. But it may be that the certitude that two and two make four, combined with some knowledge of the basic reasons why they make four, lures the scientist into the naughty, mocking pleasure of exhibiting those simple figures in

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