My father-in-law was only once in the witness-box.  I had the felicity to see him there.  It was a dispute about the price of a picture, and in the course of his very short evidence he hazarded the opinion that the grouping of the figures (they were portraits) was in bad taste.  The Judge, the late Mr. Justice Cave, an excellent lawyer of the old school, snarled out, ’Do you think you could explain to me what is taste?’ Mr. Locker surveyed the Judge through the eye-glass which seemed almost part of his being, with a glance modest, deferential, deprecatory, as if suggesting ’Who am I to explain anything to you?’ but at the same time critical, ironical, and humorous.  It was but for one brief moment; the eyeglass dropped, and there came the mournful answer, as from a man baffled at all points:  ’No, my lord; I should find it impossible!’ The Judge grunted a ready, almost a cheerful, assent.

Properly to describe Mr. Locker, you ought to be able to explain both to judge and jury what you mean by taste.  He sometimes seemed to me to be all taste.  Whatever subject he approached—­was it the mystery of religion, or the moralities of life, a poem or a print, a bit of old china or a human being—­whatever it might be, it was along the avenue of taste that he gently made his way up to it.  His favourite word of commendation was pleasing, and if he ever brought himself to say (and he was not a man who scattered his judgments, rather was he extremely reticent of them) of a man, and still more of a woman, that he or she was unpleasing, you almost shuddered at the fierceness of the condemnation, knowing, as all Locker’s intimate friends could not help doing, what the word meant to him.  ‘Attractive’ was another of his critical instruments.  He meets Lord Palmerston, and does not find him ‘attractive’ (My Confidences, p. 155).

This is a temperament which when cultivated, as it was in Mr. Locker’s case, by a life-long familiarity with beautiful things in all the arts and crafts, is apt to make its owner very susceptible to what some stirring folk may not unjustly consider the trifles of life.  Sometimes Locker might seem to overlook the dominant features, the main object of the existence, either of a man or of some piece of man’s work, in his sensitively keen perception of the beauty, or the lapse from beauty, of some trait of character or bit of workmanship.  This may have been so.  Mr. Locker was more at home, more entirely his own delightful self, when he was calling your attention to some humorous touch in one of Bewick’s tail-pieces, or to some plump figure in a group by his favourite Stothard than when handling a Michael Angelo drawing or an amazing Blake.  Yet, had it been his humour, he could have played the showman to Michael Angelo and Blake at least as well as to Bewick, Stothard, or Chodowiecki.  But a modesty, marvellously mingled with irony, was of the very essence of his nature.