Soldiers and sailors promoted to command are said to be in general tyrants; in nine cases out of ten, when they are tyrants, they have been obliged to have recourse to extreme severity in order to protect themselves from the insolence and mutinous spirit of the men,—­’He is no better than ourselves:  shoot him, bayonet him, or fling him overboard!’ they say of some obnoxious individual raised above them by his merit.  Soldiers and sailors in general, will bear any amount of tyranny from a lordly sot, or the son of a man who has ’plenty of brass’—­their own term—­but will mutiny against the just orders of a skilful and brave officer who ‘is no better than themselves.’  There was the affair of the Bounty, for example:  Bligh was one of the best seamen that ever trod deck, and one of the bravest of men; proofs of his seamanship he gave by steering, amidst dreadful weather, a deeply laden boat for nearly four thousand miles over an almost unknown ocean—­of his bravery, at the fight of Copenhagen, one of the most desperate ever fought, of which after Nelson he was the hero:  he was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the Bounty mutinied against him, and set him half naked in an open boat, with certain of his men who remained faithful to him, and ran away with the ship.  Their principal motive for doing so was an idea, whether true or groundless the writer cannot say, that Bligh was ’no better than themselves’; he was certainly neither a lord’s illegitimate, nor possessed of twenty thousand pounds.

* * * * *

There they come, the bruisers, from far London, or from wherever else they might chance to be at that time, to the great rendezvous in the old city; some came one way, some another:  some of tip-top reputation came with peers in their chariots, for glory and fame are such fair things that even peers are proud to have those invested therewith by their sides; others came in their own gigs, driving their own bits of blood, and I heard one say:  ’I have driven through at a heat the whole one hundred and eleven miles, and only stopped to bait twice.’  Oh, the blood-horses of old England! but they too have had their day—­for everything beneath the sun there is a season and a time.  But the greater number come just as they can contrive; on the tops of coaches, for example; and amongst these there are fellows with dark sallow faces and sharp shining eyes; and it is these that have planted rottenness in the core of pugilism, for they are Jews, and, true to their kind, have only base lucre in view.

It was fierce old Cobbett, I think, who first said that the Jews first introduced bad faith amongst pugilists.  He did not always speak the truth, but at any rate he spoke it when he made that observation.  Strange people the Jews—­endowed with every gift but one, and that the highest, genius divine,—­genius which can alone make of men demigods, and elevate them above earth and what is earthy and what is grovelling; without which a clever nation—­and who more clever than the Jews?—­may have Rambams in plenty, but never a Fielding nor a Shakespeare; a Rothschild and a Mendoza, yes—­but never a Kean nor a Belcher.