The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran, student at law.  A simple and pathetic memoir—­which deserved to be as successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti—­introduces us to the unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into the Fives Court, witnessed a “sparring-exhibition” by two celebrated pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character.  From that moment nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of self-defence.  To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies of the Chicken and the Nonpareil.  On one occasion he appeared before her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of taking part in the boxing, and “it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself.”  The attachment of the young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of forbidding him her presence for the future.  He felt this abandonment bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was destroying him.  He fell into a decline, and at last died “without a struggle, just after writing a sonnet to West-Country Dick.”

The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting opera called King Tims the First, which is the tragedy of an emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in ottava rima, called The Fields of Tothill, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces.  Some of these latter are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter Corcoran’s earlier days.  The most characteristic and the best deal, however, with the science of fisticuffs.  Here are the lines sent by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have described above, “after a casual turn up”: 

  Forgive me,—­and never, oh, never again,
    I’ll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1]
  I’ll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain,
    And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan’s[2] society.

  Forgive me,—­and mufflers I’ll carefully pull
    O’er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred;
  To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool,
    And temper with leather a punch of the head_.

  And, Kate!—­if you’ll fib from your forehead that frown,
    And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;—­
  I’ll look,—­if the swelling should ever go down,
    And these eyes look again,—­upon you, love, alone!

[Footnote 1:  “Heavy brown with a dash of blue in it” was the fancy phrase for stout mixed with gin.]

[Footnote 2:  The author of Boxiana and Life in London.]