-box was produced, and just
how long the pause was before the pinch was taken and the bandana came
into play. It was almost as though these effects were proceeding before
my very eyes--these sublime effects of the finest actor I have ever
seen. Expressed through a perfect technique, his personality was
overwhelming. 'Come, Mr. Pigott,' he is reported as saying, at a
crucial moment, 'try to do yourself justice. Remember! you are face to
face with My Lords.' How well do I hear, in that awful hortation,
Russell's pause after the word 'remember,' and the lowered voice in
which the subsequent words were uttered slowly, and the richness of
solemnity that was given to the last word of all, ere the thin lips
snapped together--those lips that were so small, yet so significant, a
feature of that large, white, luminous and inauspicious face. It is an
hortation which, by whomsoever delivered, would tend to dispirit the
bravest and most honest of witnesses. The presence of a judge is
always, as I have said, oppressive. The presence of three is trebly so.
Yet not a score of them serried along the bench could have outdone in
oppressiveness Sir Charles Russell. He alone, among the counsel I have
seen, was an exception to the rule that by a judge every one in court
is levelled. On the bench, in his last years, he was not notably more
predominant than he ever had been. And the reason of his predominance
at the Bar was not so much in the fact that he had no rival in
swiftness, in subtlety, in grasp, as in the passionate strength of his
nature, the intensity that in him was at the root of the grand manner.

In the courts, as in parliament and in the theatre, the grand manner is
a thing of the past. Mr. Lloyd-George is not, in style and method, more
remote from Gladstone, nor Mr. George Alexander from Macready, than is
Mr. Rufus Isaacs, the type of modern advocate, from Russell. Strength,
passion, sonorousness, magnificence of phrasing, are things which the
present generation vaguely approves in retrospect; but it would titter
at a contemporary demonstration of them. While I was reading Pigott's
cross-examination, an idea struck me; why do not the managers of our
theatres, always querulous about the dearth of plays, fall back on
scenes from famous trials? A trial-scene in a play, though usually
absurd, is almost always popular. Why not give us actual trial-scenes?
They could not, of course, be nearly so exciting as the originals, for
the si