What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

But when I was a lad the introduction to the brief was my first study. If it looked dull and boresome I dropped the papers speedily. How often in after life I wished I could deal with briefs in similar fashion. And as no child will ever read these pages I may confess that from the short years of my schooling the only things that remain with me are elegant extracts of forbidden reading; forbidden not by my father, I should say in fairness to both of us, for he knew all about it and winked, but by my pastors and masters.

I think it is Walt Whitman who expresses the thought that he would like to get away from mankind and “turn and live among the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.” And I have the same kind of feeling about school-masters. The prosperous incompetence of the school-master is to me one of the great mysteries of life. When I lived among school-masters a cowardly idolatry, the offspring of tyranny and coercion, prevented me using opportunities to make careful observation of their mental and moral constitution. I had a vague knowledge that they were hopelessly wrong, but I had not the energy and ability to analyse the wherefore of it. Physically they were of varying size and beauty, but mentally they were absolutely and uniformly all alike. It never occurred to my young mind that this was a natural result of pouring youthful educational hot stuff into an old-fashioned mould and turning it out when it had grown cold.

There were, of course, many charming persons among them. What an excellent fellow was E——. I have long forgiven him, but his offence was rank and smells to heaven. He it was who persuaded me for a whole term to spend my overtime on school books. I have some prizes on my shelves now, the result of my foolish complaisance. I have never looked inside them, but the bindings are handsome, and they serve as a memento mori of wasted hours that can never be replaced. The speculation was commercially sound, no doubt, but whilst I was doing it my conscience smote me. The next term I dropped it, and my good friend, with that rare prophetic insight that enables the school-master to foresee the unbetiding, filed my deficiency account in words that still have a haunting sound of failure: “has some ability, but no staying power.”

It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old E——’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken their heads at the word ability—​did so, I remember, at the time—​and have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E—— himself would not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words of the school-master might be fulfilled, and

that in not having done so I am in danger of judgment.

The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns Carr, who then edited the English Illustrated Magazine, accepted my first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s clerk, have none of that tremens delirium about them that you attain when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a satisfactory bit of “overtime.”

My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr. Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For some reason or other that ended the

series. It was not half a bad book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it contains—​but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to try and write such a chapter.

And I suppose it is only right to enter on these time-sheets my journalistic work as overtime. I know nothing so exhilarating as journalism. If I was really to take to writing as a business, I should hire an upper chamber in some building which was gently rocked from below by a steady throbbing engine, and arrange for the smell of its oil, coupled with the aroma of printer’s ink, to pervade the atmosphere, then having hired a whistling and insistent boy, with a raucous voice, to put his head in and shout “copy” at me every quarter of an hour, I should sit down to work, hopefully assured of a glorious “spate of style.” For many years I wrote dramatic criticism and reviewed books, and wrote “shorts” and occasionally full-dress leaders for the Manchester Guardian. I do not think I had any very particular reputation in Cross Street, except for punctuality and dispatch. It is not every journalist who has even these humble attributes, but they were evidently well remembered of me.

I mind meeting C. P. Scott one autumn morning some three years after I had been judge, as I was walking down to my work—​along the fragrant groves of Rusholme. He seemed somewhat disconsolate