The Gazette 1972

tance." Sheil's acerbity, more lasting than the stone,

was softened a little perhaps by the sculptor's nepotism.

But only a little. Sheil's description of the living man

can stand well enough for the effigy. Joy looked as dry

a stick as any in his beloved herbarium and the twenty-

line eulogy of his pedestal was no answer to Sheil.

Chief Justice Whiteside

Whiteside was unveiled at the opening of the Easter

Term, 15th April 1880—the newspapers disrespectfully

said "by the broom handle of the hall sweeper". Any-

way there was no ceremony when four years after his

death he was set up at the right of the clock beside the

Queen's Bench. The sculptor was the pre-Raphaelite,

Thomas Woolner, sculptor

en titre

to the Victorian men

°f letters. He also carved Bacon for Acland's new

Museum in Oxford, and when he placed Moses with

'he tables of the law on the apex of the Manchester

Assize Courts we may guess that he took a hint from

our Four Courts. Whiteside stood, a tall commanding

figure in frock-coat and trousers, before a pile of books,

his left hand hanging by his side with the notes of his

speech, his right crossed over his breast. The attitude

was very different from what the Parliamentary corres-

pondent of

The Nation

saw in Westminster on 3rd May

1856 : "Whiteside talked thirteen columns. People for-

got that gigantic gesticulations of apish arms and acro-

oatish vertebrae and listened with amazed admiration

t the frightfully fluent Counsellor. You could see the

pudnight oil in his hair!" Woolner's statue showed a

buttoned-up intellectual with bald head, the hair clu-

'ering at the back; the expression was severe and con-

temporary writers took exception to the head as lacking

'ts proper breadth and massiveness, and to the expres-

on as not exhibiting the variety and genial nature of

'he orator. The:e are the sculptor's tribulations of

which posterity is an indifferent judge. Certainly Bruce

Joy's seated figure in St. Patrick's does, in profile and

front, skilfully indicate his subject's changing linea-

ments. The Four Courts statue, as I recall it justly or

pt, made a single impression of rigid authority and its

Clv

ilian attire was just redeemed from banality by its

Simple severity. It was no masterpiece except by Vic-

torian standards and was hardly adequate to White-

Side's distinction, but it had the stance of an orator and

looked well. The pedestal was inscribed "Whiteside".

Lord Chancellor Plunket

Plunket stood to the left of the clock. Erected by ,the

r of Ireland and so inscribed, the sculptor was again

Patrick McDowell and the statue was placed in 1884,

thirty years after the sculptor had laid down his chisel.

Actually the statue had been executed in August 1863.

1' would appear that in the middle eighties there was

^me individual initiative or concerted movement

mongst the Benchers of this date, to complete the

sculptural decoration of the hall with memorials of the

more-distinguished members of the Bench and Bar. We

jmd Whiteside, 1880, Plunket and Sheil, 1884, and

p>Hagan, 1887, commemorated in the same decade. If

me series had been completed by O'Connell and Curran,

Hogan, instead of the Academicians, had been timely

commissioned, the representation, honourable to subject

nd subscribers, would have been more justly fulfilled.

There was a blunt directness about this statue of

Rlunket that made up for its shortcomings. He stood,

mancing Whiteside, in a curious short double-breasted

coat with tails, his left arm akimbo, his right extended,

a cloak draping the back at half length. There was

assurance in the pose and the head was convincing.

W. H. Curran and Phillips tell us how he struck his

contemporaries: "A tall, squire-built, robust, ascetic,

his aspect was the reverse of his companionable nature,

but it quared with his vigorous intellect and its mascu-

line expression. He disdained the externals of the

oratory of which he was a master. His gestures were few,

his lips unsmiling, his features blunt and harsh." These

also were characteristics that marked McDowell's statue,

riveted one's attention, and diverted it from some grace-

lessness in the natural forms.

Sheil standing near the old Common Pleas—now

Court II—was the entertaining opposite. It is worth

reviving Christopher North's description of him though

it does not in every respect confirm the statue. Sheil was

actually five feet, four inches in height. North notes

him as : "The smallest of the small in stature, shabbiest

of the shabby in attire, voice like a gimlet, eyes large,

deeply set, dark, liquid, and flashing, fixing you as a

basilisk, but after ten minutes you feel yourself in the

presence of a man of genius." This statue and Plunket's

alone continually held and renewed my interest. Each

represented an opposite facet of genius so plainly as to

put any spectator on enquiry. Like Plunket and White-

side, Sheil was in civilian dress and, as I remember him,

small and dapper with no touch of slovenliness* There

was something bird-like and brilliant in the set of the

head, and animation of the eyes, and the erect hair.

Memory perhaps cheats me and a willing subjugation

to the subject-interest, for though Thomas Farrell,

R.H.A., fabricated some mildly dignified figures and

many wholly unhappy, I cannot think him equal to the

image that remains in my mind. But there must have

been something sufficient in the modelling of the head

and in the alert poise to reflect the sparkle of this bril-

liant rhetorician. The statue was the gift to the Ben-

chers of Lord Gormanstown as trustee of Montesquieu

Belew and it was erected below the niche between the

Queen's Bench and Common Pleas on 15th November

1884.

Lord Chancellor O'Hagan

O'Hagan, modelled by the same sculptor in 1885,

was erected in 1886-87—two years after his death. A

few years later and it would not have occurred to any-

one so to commemorate him. He stood near Whiteside

on the other side of King's Bench I, head bare, in court

dress and Chancellor's robes with a book in his right

hand, a dignified banalitv. The head "the face of the

melancholy Melanchthon" was reasonably well modelled

but the gesture of the arms, though more fully draped,

repeated the Whiteside almost as obviously as the legs

so unfortunately repeat themselves in Farrell's Smith

O'Brien and Sir John Grey in O'Connell Street.

On the whole we were fortunate in these statues

though the greatest names were absent and one or two

present who were only slightly meritable. As sculpture

none was unmeritorious though none was comparable

with Hogan's O'Connell or Drummond or Smyth's

Lucas in the Gitv Hall. They added an appropriate

dignity to Gandon's architecture. Now they are crum-

bled into dust, finer than that which covers the vain

titles of Justinian's victories. On the 3rd July 1922 I

saw them prostrate under the open sky. Smyth's work

fallen into indistinction, Lord Chancellor, judges and

advocates broken and calcined. I stuck my thumb into

Joy—he had the consistency of cream cheese.

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