flies,—­
  The Nonpareil stands!  Fame, whose bright eyes run o’er
    With joy to see a Chicken of her own. 
    Dips her rich pen in_ claret_, and writes down
  Under the letter R, first on the score,
    “Randall,—­John,—­Irish Parents,—­age not known,—­
  Good with both hands, and only ten stone four!_”

Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader!  Virtue is well revenged by the inevitable question!  “Who was John Randall?” In 1820 it was said:  “Of all the great men in this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent as Randall, no one who combines the finest natural powers with the most elegant and finished acquired ones.”  Now, if his memory be revived for a moment, this master of science, who doubled up an opponent as if he were plucking a flower, and whose presence turned Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of being confounded with the last couple of drunken Irishwomen who have torn out each other’s hair in handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard.  The mighty have fallen, the stakes and ring are gone forever, and Virtue is avenged.  The days of George IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes of the glory of John Randall.

It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in this odd collection of verses in praise of prizefighting.  There are lines and phrases that recall Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book is robust enough to satisfy the most impassioned of Tory editors.  As it happens, it was written by Keats’s dearest friend, by John Hamilton Reynolds, whom the great poet mentions so affectionately in the latest of all his letters.  Reynolds has been treated with scant consideration by the critics.  His verses, I protest, are no whit less graceful or sparkling than those of his more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall.  His Garden of Florence is worthy of the friend of Keats.  We have seen how his Peter Bell, which was Peter Bell the First, took the wind out of Shelley’s satiric sails and fluttered the dove-cotes of the Lakeists.  He was as smart as he could be, too clever to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age.  In The Fancy, which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820, Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore’s Tom Crib, but if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original.  He takes as his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and persuades us

    nor need we blame the licensed joys,
  Though false to Nature’s quiet equipoise: 
  Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive.

We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.