spectators that his
intellect was the paramount power of the bench; at other times a
personal dislike to one of his _puisnes_ caused him to derogate from the
dignity of his court, in cases where he was especially careful to
protect the interests of suitors. With silence more disdainful than any
words could have been, he used to turn away from Mr. Justice Willes, at
the moment when the latter expected his chief to ask his opinion; and on
such occasions the indignant _puisne_ seldom had the prudence and nerve
to conceal his mortification. "I have not been consulted, and I will be
heard!" he once shrieked forth in a paroxysm of rage caused by
Mansfield's contemptuous treatment; and forty years afterwards Jeremy
Bentham, who was a witness of the insult and its effect, observed: "At
this distance of time--five-and-thirty or forty years--the feminine
scream issuing out of his manly frame still tingles in my ears."
Mansfield's overbearing demeanor to his _puisnes_ was reproduced with
less dignity by his successor; but Buller, the judge who wore ermine
whilst he was still in his thirty-third year, and who confessed that his
"idea of heaven was to sit at Nisi Prius all day, and to play whist all
night," seized the first opportunity to give Taffy Kenyon a lesson in
good manners by stating, with impressive self-possession and convincing
logic, the reasons which induced him to think the judgment delivered by
his chief to be altogether bad in law and argument.

[30] One of Jekyll's best displays of brilliant impudence was
perpetrated on a Welsh judge, who was alike notorious for his greed of
office and his want of personal cleanliness. "My dear sir," Jekyll
observed in his most amiable manner to this most unamiable personage,
"you have asked the minister for almost everything else, why _don't_ you
ask him for a piece of soap and a nail-brush?"

CHAPTER XLI.

WITS IN 'SILK' AND PUNSTERS IN 'ERMINE.'

Whilst Lord Camden held the chiefship of the Common Pleas, he was
walking with his friend Lord Dacre on the outskirts of an Essex village,
when they passed the parish stocks. "I wonder," said the Chief Justice,
"whether a man in the stocks endures a punishment that is physically
painful? I am inclined to think that, apart from the sense of
humiliation and other mental anguish, the prisoner suffers nothing,
unless the populace express their satisfaction at his fate by pelting
him with brick-bats." "Suppose you settle your doub