It was almost as though these effects
were proceeding before my very eyes--these sublime effects of the
finest actor I have ever seen. Expressed through a perfect technique,
his personality was overwhelming. `Come, Mr. Pigott,' he is reported
as saying, at a crucial moment, `try to do yourself justice. Remember!
you are face to face with My Lords.' How well do I hear, in that awful
hortation, Russell's pause after the word `remember,' and the lowered
voice in which the subsequent words were uttered slowly, and the
richness of solemnity that was given to the last word of all, ere the
thin lips snapped together--those lips that were so small, yet so
significant, a feature of that large, white, luminous and inauspicious
face. It is an hortation which, by whomsoever delivered, would tend to
dispirit the bravest and most honest of witnesses. The presence of a
judge is always, as I have said, oppressive. The presence of three is
trebly so. Yet not a score of them serried along the bench could have
outdone in oppressiveness Sir Charles Russell. He alone, among the
counsel I have seen, was an exception to the rule that by a judge
every one in court is levelled. On the bench, in his last years, he
was not notably more predominant than he ever had been.
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