But there I was, a very junior barrister, with a very junior wife and a still more junior daughter, all desirous of being comfortably provided for; and to my eternal gratitude and surprise, Manchester rose to the occasion and not only—to use the slang of the tables—“saw me,” but “went one better” than my best hopes in contributing to my career.
What little accidents determine the course of a man’s life! We start like streams from the mountain source, intending to fight our way down into the valleys where our fathers have preceded us. But on the upper slopes at the outset of our career we meet some boulder or bank of earth and are turned west instead of east, and so away into quite other valleys and along towards another sea. If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that I should be County Court Judge of Manchester within fifteen years I should have put a sovereign on the other way or given the long odds in a hopeful spirit.
For there was nothing of Manchester in my thoughts when, after my father’s death, I left King’s College School and gave up for ever those pleasant journeys in the old underground railway, where we learned our lessons by inferior gas-light in an atmosphere of sulphur. Honestly, looking back on that school in the underworld of Somerset House, I have an uneasy feeling that there was no health in it. But there were pleasant companions, and, if you cared for such things, much classical learning and Church doctrine. It did not occur to the boy mind that light and air were necessary to healthy life, and of course it had never entered the thoughts of the pastors and masters responsible for that scholastic warren. Whilst I was there I carried away with me a few prizes and a broken nose, and a knowledge of those portions of the Church Catechism which fitted in with the place in class where I sat of a Monday morning. I was sixteen when I left school, and for the first time in my life began to seriously consider the desirability of studying things. I have been some sort of a student ever since.
My first idea was to study mathematics with a view to trying for a scholarship at Cambridge. I wonder if I had followed that stream into what dead sea it would have carried me. I know as a fact that I was accounted fairly good at the subject, but that is difficult for me to believe to-day, for anything more complicated than very simple addition I always refer in a thankful spirit to the
Registrar. Afterwards I fancied I would be an artist, and joined the Slade School and drew in the “Antique” for a few months. I got very little encouragement there. Legros once looked at one of my drawings, and took up a piece of charcoal as if to show me some of the errors of line in my work; but his heart failed him. He sighed, shook his head, grunted a guttural French grunt of despair, and turned on his heel. However, I can boast that I am a pupil of Legros, and if he treasured my piece of charcoal it may yet be a valuable lot at Christie’s—who knows?
At the end of 1881 I had made up my mind that it was time to commence a career with money in it. I chose the Bar because I knew no other. I went down to the old courts at Westminster, and, finding one of my father’s clerks, got him to take me to Sir Henry James, as he then was. He was a very old friend of my father, and not only signed the necessary papers with pleasure, but introduced me to Sir Farrer Herschell, who was sitting next to him, and he signed as well. With such godfathers, I was cordially received into the ancient house of the Middle Temple, after satisfying two reverend benchers that I knew enough Latin and history to make it unwise for them to expose the amount of their own knowledge of these subjects by asking me further questions.
Thursday, January 19, 1882! More than thirty years ago. And yet the memory of my first dinner at the Temple is here to-day,
winnowed out of the myriad happenings of all these years.
I see a thin slip of humanity shrinking among his elders into that historical Elizabethan hall and asking the old mace bearer with whispering humbleness where he may sit. Unknowingly, he chooses the place of captain of a mess—the arbiter of the feast of four—and, taking courage from the unwonted gown, brazens out his position until his want of knowledge of the ceremonies concerning the first glass of wine exposes him as a newcomer.
I know that there was plenty of genial talk and laughter at that table, but I remember none of it. For in my heart of hearts I was wondering why I had come there at all, and feeling that the ghosts of all the great Templars of the past were chuckling among the rafters at my folly, and that, truly, I was honest food for their mocks. But among all my hopes and fears and forebodings Manchester certainly had no place. Yet the “writing on the wall” was there, or, rather, he was sitting with his back to it on my left-hand side. His name was Smith, and he came from Manchester.