nk you, my Lord,' replied
the man, 'that's quite right,' and left the court quite cheerfully.
Fitzjames was touched by the man's confidence in a judge, and by his
accurate knowledge of the proper legal tariff of punishment. Fitzjames
was scrupulously anxious in other ways not to wrest the law, even if
unsatisfactory in itself, out of dislike to the immediate offender. One
instance is given by the curious case of the Queen v. Ashwell (in 1885).
A man had borrowed a shilling from another, who gave him a sovereign by
mistake. The borrower discovered the mistake an hour afterwards, and
appropriated the sovereign. Morally, no doubt, he was as dishonest as a
thief. But the question arose whether he was in strict law guilty of
larceny. Fitzjames delivered an elaborate judgment to show that upon the
accepted precedents of law, he was not guilty, inasmuch as the original
act of taking was innocent.

Another aspect of justice, upon which Fitzjames dwells in his books, was
represented in his practice. A judge, according to him, is not simply a
logic machine working out intellectual problems, but is the organ of the
moral indignation of mankind. When, after a studiously fair inquiry, a
man had been proved to be a scoundrel, he became the proper object of
wrath and of the punishment by which such wrath is gratified. Fitzjames
undeniably hated brutality, and especially mean brutality; he thought
that gross cruelty to women and children should be suppressed by the
lash, or, if necessary, by the gallows. His sentences, I am told, were
not more severe than those of other judges: though mention is made of
one case in early days in which he was thought to be too hard upon a
ruffian who, on coming out of gaol, had robbed a little child of a
sixpence. But his mode of passing sentence showed that his hatred of
brutality included hatred of brutes. He did not affect to be reluctant
to do his duty. He did not explain that he was acting for the real good
of the prisoner, or apologise for being himself an erring mortal. He
showed rather the stern satisfaction of a man suppressing a noxious
human reptile. Thus, though he carefully avoided anything savouring of
the theatrical, the downright simplicity with which he delivered
sentence showed the strength of his feeling. He never preached to the
convicts, but spoke in plain words of their atrocities. The most
impressive sentence I ever heard, says one of his sons, was one upon a
wife-murderer at Norw