THE LIGHTER SIDE less this unedifying incident was due rather to his misfortune than to his fault; but ermine, even if itself unsullied, becomes somewhat depreciated when placed in contact with dirty linen, and Lord Coleridge never quite survived so unfortunate a shock to his prestige. How much Coleridge, when at the bar, owed to the untiring ability and laboriousness of Charles Bowen only those who were behind the scenes can properly estimate. Bowen cer tainly never recovered the strain of the Tichborne trial, in which he was throughout the animating spirit of the Attorney-general, who without him would many times have perilously floundered. Bowen was one of the subtlest and most brilliant lawyers that ever adorned the English bench. Moreover, he was endowed with a peculiarly mordant wit, enunciating the most sardonic utterances in a voice of almost feminine softness. Of these, perhaps, the most prominent was his protest to the counsel who was impugning wholesale certain evidence which had been filed against his client. "Aren't you going a little too far, Mr. ?" he murmurously interposed. "Truth, you know, will occasionally out, even in an affi davit." Lord Esther was at the best but rugged ore compared to the thrice-refined gold of Charles Bowen, who, if he had only deigned to trample the dust of the political arena, would have equaled on the woolsack even the reputation of Westbury. But law was not the only field in which he shone. If not actually a poet, he was a versewriter of a very high order, while as an essayist or a historian he would, by dint of style alone, assuredly have won a distinguished place. His single defect was perhaps an undue pro clivity for irony, which on one occasion he indulged in from the Bench, with disastrous effect on the jury. Shortly after his appoint ment as a puisne judge he was trying a burglar in some country town, and by way of mitigat ing the tedium of the proceedings summed up something in the following fashion: "You will have observed, gentlemen, that the prosecuting counsel laid great stress on the enormity of the offense with which the prisoner is charged, but I think it is only due to the prisoner to point out that in proceeding about his enterprise he at all
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events displayed remarkable consideration for the inmates of the house. For instance, rather than disturb the owner, an invalid lady, as you will have remarked, with commendable solici tude he removed his boots and went about in his stockings, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather. Further, instead of rushing with heedless rapacity into the pantry, he care fully removed the coal-scuttle and any other obstacles which, had he thoughtlessly collided with them, would have created a noise that must have aroused the jaded servants from their well-earned repose." After proceeding in this strain for some little time, he dismissed the jury to consider their verdict, and was horror-struck when, on their return into court, they pronounced the acquittal of the prisoner. Lord Bowen was probably the only judge who, on being summoned on an emergency to the dread ordeal of taking admiralty cases, entered upon his doom with a pleasantry. After explaining to the counsel of that con summately technical tribunal the reason of his presiding over it on the occasion in question, and warning t^hem of his inexperience in this particular branch of practice, he concluded his remarks with the following quotation from Tennyson's beautiful lyric, then recently published :— "And may there be no moaning of the Bar When I put out to sea." ONE of the greatest equity judges of the last half century was the late Sir George Jessel, the first and so far the only Jew who has been raised to the English Bench. Jessel's appoint ment was received with a certain amount of misgiving, not on account of his attainments, which were unexceptionable, but by reason of an undesirable audacity which had occasionally marked his conduct of cases at the Bar. There is no doubt that at a pinch, in order to score a point, he was not above "improving" the actual text of the report which he purported to be quoting, and I well remember that this practice produced quite a dramatic little scene when, having sprung upon a particularly pains taking opponent some case which apparently demolished the latter's argument, that learned gentleman, with an almost apoplectic gasp, requested that the volume might be passed to him. The result of his perusal was more satis
