I wish my father could have lived long enough for me to have heard him at his best at one of those Garrick dinners, where he loved to get two or three gathered together in the right place and enjoy pleasant discourse over the walnuts and wine. Good port and good stories were his hobbies. There may be better ones, but I doubt it. And anyhow “so long as a man rides his hobby-horse peacefully and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind him—pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” But if I had had the sense or foresight to play the Boswell, what a collection of good stories even I might have chronicled. Years after he was gone I was brought up to a London county court to fight an employers’ liability case, and the counsel against me was Mr. Wildy Wright. Good-natured, obtrusive and antique were his methods of advocacy, but I was glad to have met him in the flesh, for he recalled to my mind my father returning from Croydon Assizes bubbling over with delight about a story of a “certain judge” recently appointed and Mr. Wildy Wright.
The judge had been puzzled by a fierce objection to evidence made by Mr. Wildy Wright, and reserved
his ruling on this point until he had consulted his brother judge at the adjournment.
During the luncheon interval he put the point to his brother, who was deeply puzzled.
“And who raised the point?” he asked after a few moments of complicated thought.
“Wildy Wright.”
“Oh!” replied his brother with a sigh of relief, “Wildy Wright! Overrule it. And if he makes any other objections, overrule them too.”
The learned judge, much relieved, went back to Court, and in courteous, silvern tones said, “Mr. Wright, I have carefully considered the objection you raised before the adjournment and consulted my learned brother, and we are both agreed that I ought to overrule it. And I may say for your assistance that if in the course of the case you make any other objections, I shall feel it my duty to overrule those also.”
Now I begin to remember those old days and that very happy home, I feel I should like to try and paint many pictures of its happiness, but it would be far from my purpose. All I wish to set down is that from the very first, like Mr. Vincent Crummles’s pony, who, you will remember, went on circuit all his life, I was brought up among briefs and the talk of law shop and the traditions of the profession. It was always one of my ambitions to go to the Bar, but I had very little hope then that it would be realised. My elder brother, John Humffreys Parry, who chose afterwards to go on the stage and, after
playing in America with Richard Mansfield, died at the beginning of a brilliant career, was far better equipped than I was to wear my father’s robes when he should lay them down. Moreover, in early life, to use a north-country phrase, I “enjoyed” bad health. I had nearly every fever known to physicians and fell into the surgeon’s hands twice, breaking a collar-bone and nearly losing my left hand with an accident arising out of and in the course of my employment by running a chisel through it whilst building a toy theatre. In these and other ways my school-days were often interfered with, and I have been “backward” as the phrase is ever since.