But on another day his mind turned to a more cheerful exercise:  “Legal testimony doesn’t affect me at all, and I want people tried for their faces—­so I spent the time in court settling things all my own way, and I tried the Judges first and acquitted one, so that he sits in court without a blemish on his character; and one I admitted to mercy, and of the other have postponed the trial for further evidence:  and then I tried the counsel on both sides, and one of them I am sorry to say will have to be hanged for his face.”

THE FOUR HISTORIANS
[Sidenote:  Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones]

On hearing some one quote Carlyle’s contempt for invented stories and his saying that facts were better worth writing of, Edward exclaimed:  “‘Frederick the Great’s’ a romance; ‘Monte Cristo’ is real history, and so is ‘The Three Musketeers.’” And another time he said:  “Ah, the historians are so few.  There’s Dumas, there’s Scott, there’s Thackeray, and there’s Dickens, and no more—­after you have said them, there’s an end.”

SWINBURNE AND PADEREWSKI [Sidenote:  Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones]

“There’s a beautiful fellow in London named Paderewski—­and I want to have a face like him and look like him, and I can’t—­there’s trouble.  He looks so like Swinburne looked at twenty that I could cry over past things, and has his ways too—­the pretty ways of him—­courteous little tricks and low bows and a hand that clings in shaking hands, and a face very like Swinburne’s, only in better drawing, but the expression the same, and little turns and looks and jerks so like the thing I remember that it makes me fairly jump.  I asked to draw from him, and Henschel brought him and played on the organ and sang while I drew—­which was good for the emotions but bad for the drawing.  And knowing people say he is a great master in his art, which might well be, for he looks glorious.  I praised Allah for making him and felt myself a poor thing for several hours.  Have got over it now.”

THE VIVACIOUS VIVIER
[Sidenote:  H.  Sutherland-Edwards]

I “breakfasted” again and again with Adolphe Sax, and had always the same fare—­“un bifteck et des oeufs sur le plat.” ...

On one occasion Vivier turned up.  He was the natural enemy of Sax, for Sax, by his system of keys, brought effective horn-playing within the reach of ordinary performers, which lessened the immense superiority of Vivier over horn-players in general.  Vivier, however, was troubled by no considerations of that kind.  The Saxhorn, moreover, did not possess the timbre of the horn.

I had already met this remarkable engineer, musician, diplomatist and professor of mystification, in London, when he was complaining with facetious bitterness that Mr. Frederic Gye had not sent him a box for one of Angiolina Bosio’s touching performances of “La Traviata.”