Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which gave me pleasure.  A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called “Rodney Stone” to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon a bed of mortal sickness.  The dying gladiator listened with intent interest but keen, professional criticism to the combats of the novel.  The reader had got to the point where the young amateur fights the brutal Berks.  Berks is winded, but holds his adversary off with a stiff left arm.  The amateur’s second in the story, an old prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal with the situation.  “That’s right.  By —–­ he’s got him!” yelled the stricken man in the bed.  Who cares for critics after that?

You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown volumes which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow.  They are the three volumes of “Pugilistica,” given me years ago by my old friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for half an hour without striking it rich.  Alas! for the horrible slang of those days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and its fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing a word or two in every sentence.  Even these stern and desperate encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon.  You have to tum to Hazlitt’s account of the encounter between the Gasman and the Bristol Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all.  It is a hardened reader who does not wince even in print before that frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and left him in “red ruin” from eyebrow to jaw.  But even if there be no Hazlitt present to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination which is not fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these little-read pages.  They were picturesque creatures, men of great force of character and will, who reached the limits of human bravery and endurance.  There is Jackson on the cover, gold upon brown, “gentleman Jackson,” Jackson of the balustrade calf and the noble head, who wrote his name with an 88-pound weight dangling from his little finger.

Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well—­

“I can see him now as I saw him in ’84 walking down Holborn Hill, towards Smithfield.  He had on a scarlet coat worked in gold at the buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace, a small white stock, no collar (they were not then invented), a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches and long silk strings, striped white silk stockings, pumps and paste buckles; his waistcoat was pale blue satin, sprigged with white.  It was impossible to look on his fine ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything too small), his large but not too large hips, his balustrade calf and beautifully turned but not over delicate ankle, his firm foot and peculiarly small