Arrived in London, full of good advice and abundance of warnings as to the fate that awaited me, I entered as a pupil the chambers of a famous special pleader of that time, whose name was Frederick Thompson.  This was in the year 1841.

I have the right to say I worked very hard there for several months, and studied with all my might; nor was the study distasteful.  I was learning something which would be useful to me in after-life.  Moreover, being endowed with pluck and energy, I wanted to show that my uncles—­for the godfather warned me as well—­and my father were false prophets.  So I gave myself up entirely to the acquisition of knowledge, this being absolutely necessary if I was to make anything of my future career.  “Sink or swim,” my father said, was the alternative, so I was resolved to keep my head above water if possible.

After being at Thompson’s my allotted period, I next went to Mr. George Butt, a very able and learned man, who afterwards became a Queen’s Counsel, but never an advocate.  I acquired while with him a good deal of knowledge that was invaluable, became his favourite pupil, and was in due course entrusted with papers of great responsibility, so that in time it came to pass that Mr. Butt would send off my opinions without any correction.

These are small things to talk of now, but they were great then, and the foundation of what, to me, were great things to come, although I little suspected any of them at that time; and as I look back over that long stretch of years, I have the satisfaction of feeling that I did not enter upon my precarious career without doing my utmost to fit myself for it.

In those early days of the century prize-fights were very common in England.  The noble art of self-defence was patronized by the greatest in the land.  Society loved a prize-fight, and always went to see it, as Society went to any other fashionable function.  Magistrates went, and even clerical members of that august body.  As magistrates it may have been their duty to discountenance, but as county gentlemen it was their privilege to support, the noble champions of the art, especially when they had their money on the event.

The magistrates, if their presence was ever discovered, said they went to prevent a breach of the peace, but if they were unable to effect this laudable object, they looked on quietly so as to prevent any one committing a breach of the peace on themselves.  Their individual heads were worth something.

It was to one of these exhibitions of valour, between Owen Swift and Brighton Bill, that a reverend and sporting magistrate took my brother John, a nice good schoolboy, in a tall hat.  He thought it was the right thing that the boy should see the world.  I thought also that what was good for John, as prescribed by his clerical adviser, would not be bad for me, so I went as well.

There was a great crowd, of course, but I kept my eye on John’s tall chimney-pot hat, knowing that while I saw that I should not lose John.