hand, without thinking that nature had sent him on earth as a model.  On he went at a good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all men and the admiration of all women.”

Now, that is a discriminating portrait—­a portrait which really helps you to see that which the writer sets out to describe.  After reading it one can understand why even in reminiscent sporting descriptions of those old days, amid all the Tonis and Bills and Jacks, it is always Mr. John Jackson.  He was the friend and instructor of Byron and of half the bloods in town.  Jackson it was who, in the heat of combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a close-cropped race.  Inside you see the square face of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian Guard, and work his way through the regiment.  He had a chronicler, the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would take some beating.  How about this passage?—­

“He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows truly in the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself, to stop a blow, and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided by his body, producing but fly-flap blows.  No!  Broughton steps boldly and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow; receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body seconding his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the pile-driving force upon his man.”

One would like a little more from the gallant Captain.  Poor Broughton!  He fought once too often.  “Why, damn you, you’re beat!” cried the Royal Duke.  “Not beat, your highness, but I can’t see my man!” cried the blinded old hero.  Alas, there is the tragedy of the ring as it is of life!  The wave of youth surges ever upwards, and the wave that went before is swept sobbing on to the shingle.  “Youth will be served,” said the terse old pugs.  But what so sad as the downfall of the old champion!  Wise Tom Spring—­Tom of Bedford, as Borrow calls him—­had the wit to leave the ring unconquered in the prime of his fame.  Cribb also stood out as a champion.  But Broughton, Slack, Belcher, and the rest—­their end was one common tragedy.

The latter days of the fighting men were often curious and unexpected, though as a rule they were short-lived, for the alternation of the excess of their normal existence and the asceticism of their training undermined their constitution.  Their popularity among both men and women was their undoing, and the king of the ring went down at last before that deadliest of light-weights, the microbe of tubercle, or some equally fatal and perhaps less reputable bacillus.  The crockiest of spectators had a better chance of life than the magnificent young athlete whom he had come to admire.  Jem Belcher died at 30, Hooper at 31, Pearce, the