Possibly the very depth of the drinking in those days guarded many a life from sacrifice; the hand is not steady, nor the foot sure, when the brain is muddled by fumes of wine, and it was perhaps more often chance than design that guided the sword’s point in some of these combats.  Still, even so, Death too often claimed his toll from such chance strokes.

A duel between opponents equally armed was fair enough, provided that the skill and sobriety were not unequally divided, and that one of the fighters did not chance to be unduly handicapped by age.  If a man wore a sword, he knew that he might be called upon to use it—­even the most peace-loving of men might not then, without loss of honour, always succeed in avoiding a brawl; the blame was his own if he had neglected to make himself proficient in the use of his weapon.  At that period the tongue of the libeller was not tied by fear of the law; for the man insulted or libelled there existed no means of redress other than that of shedding, or trying to shed, his insulter’s blood.  It was a rough and ready mode of obtaining justice; and if it had its manifest disadvantages, it was at least not wholly unsuited to the rough and ready times.

But cases, unhappily, were not unknown in which one or other of the tipsy combatants—­in his sober moments possibly an honourable and kindly-natured man—­thrust suddenly and without warning, giving his opponent small time to draw, or even, perhaps, to rise from his chair, a course of action which, even under the easy moral code of those days, was accounted as murder.

Such a case occurred at Jedburgh in the year 1726.  Sir Gilbert Eliott of Stobs and Colonel Stewart of Stewartfield (now called Hartrigge) were the principals in the affair.

Sir Gilbert (father of the General Eliott afterwards so famed for his defence of Gibraltar in the great siege of 1779-83) was a man who had spent some part of his youth in London, a place then, as ever, little calculated to repress leanings towards conviviality in young men possessing the command of money.  Probably the habits there contracted were emphasized later, when ebbing fortune consigned him for good to what no doubt then seemed to him the deadly dull life of a dull country-side.  More than likely, too, he was a little scornful of his neighbours who knew not the delights of London, a trifle contemptuous of their country manners, and possibly he may have been of quarrelsome disposition, when in his cups quick to take offence and to see slights where none existed.  In any event, if one may judge from the evidence given later at an inquiry held in Jedburgh, throughout the affair with Colonel Stewart, Sir Gilbert Eliott was the aggressor.  Possibly, after the fashion of the day, both were more or less tipsy; certainly, without any doubt, Sir Gilbert was greatly the worse of liquor, and did not carry that liquor as a gentleman was expected to carry it.  He persistently forced a quarrel on the Colonel.