"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 absence you have had to apply to me (the defendant) for sketches of the scene in Court. What a chance Mr. Calderon has missed for a companion picture to the one he is painting of another great legal battle—the Parnell Commission! A picture in next year's Royal Academy of the trial between two art critics is surely worthy to be handed down to posterity, say, in the Council Room of the Royal Academy.
DEFENDANT.
"That the subject is not a picturesque one, I admit, but I can offer the painter an historical incident connected with it that should recommend itself. We all know that Sir Francis Drake playing at bowls when the Spanish Armada was sighted is a favourite theme with artists. In this case, although there is nothing Spanish about it, there is a parallel incident. I was, like Drake, by the sad sea waves, not playing at bowls, but sketching a common, or garden, donkey, when a telegram arrived from London to say that the great trial was in sight, and my presence was demanded at the Royal Courts of Justice (Court 3) at eleven o'clock the following morning. Let it be recorded that my nerve was equal to the great Admiral's—I finished the drawing of that donkey.
