ad heard the story of
Thackeray and Dickens--as to my right as a critic--but never denied that
these words attributed to me were absolutely a false report! The next
point Sala made was that an "offensive caricature" (reproduced by
permission on this page) was by me! It was Mr. F. C. Gould's. Sala knew
this; so did Lockwood, but he did not deny it: in fact, when the jury
considered their verdict, the two points they were clear upon were (1)
that I said Sala had offered work to Dickens, and had been refused; (2)
that I was the author of the clever (but in Sala's opinion most
offensive) caricature of himself and me.

[Illustration: MR. F. C. GOULD'S SKETCH IN THE _WESTMINSTER_, WHICH SALA
MAINTAINED WAS MINE.]

I prompted Lockwood in Court, but he told me that he would not bother
about facts, or call me, or deny anything--he took the line that the
whole thing was too absurd for serious consideration, and that he would
"laugh it out of Court."

One report says that "Mr. Lockwood handled Mr. Sala very gently in
cross-examination, and got from him an explosive declaration that Mr.
Furniss's statements represented him as an ignorant and impudent
pretender. 'Don't be angry with me, Mr. Sala.'"

But the Judge was angry with dear, good, kind Frank Lockwood, and
scotched his humour, and refused to allow him to "laugh it out of
Court." It annoyed him, and he summed up dead against me. Lockwood could
only squeeze one joke out of the whole thing.

Sala in cross-examination said to Lockwood in a bombastic, inflated,
Adelphi-drama style:

"That was not my greatest artistic work. Perhaps my greatest was an
engraving of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington. It was from my
original drawings. I engraved it on a steel plate, and it contained many
thousand figures."

Lockwood: "All, I suppose, had the proper number of toes?" (Laughter.)

"They had boots on." (Continued laughter.)

Sala got five pounds for the Judge's want of humour, not for mine.

Having no chance of making my little joke in Court, I took my revenge by
accepting a commission to report and illustrate my own trial for the
_Daily Graphic_, and the following--the only authentic account of the
Great Six Toes Trial--appeared the following morning:

"It was unfortunate that the Royal Academicians were all busy varnishing
their pictures for the forthcoming exhibition at Burlington House when
the Great Sala-Furniss Libel Case was heard on Friday last, and that in
their