y or brutality. If you are
attacked by a ruffian, as the elderly individual in Lavengro is in the
inn-yard, it is quite lawful, if you can, to give him as good a thrashing
as the elderly individual gave the brutal coachman; and if you see a
helpless woman--perhaps your own sister--set upon by a drunken lord, a
drunken coachman, or a drunken coalheaver, or a brute of any description,
either drunk or sober, it is not only lawful but laudable, to give them,
if you can, a good drubbing; but it is not lawful because you have a
strong pair of fists, and know how to use them, to go swaggering through
a fair, jostling against unoffending individuals; should you do so, you
would be served quite right if you were to get a drubbing, more
particularly if you were served out by some one less strong, but more
skilful than yourself--even as the coachman was served out by a pupil of
the immortal Broughton--sixty years old, it is true, but possessed of
Broughton's guard and chop. Moses is not blamed in the Scripture for
taking part with the oppressed, and killing an Egyptian persecutor. We
are not told how Moses killed the Egyptian; but it is quite as creditable
to Moses to suppose that he killed the Egyptian by giving him a buffet
under the left ear, as by stabbing him with a knife. It is true that the
Saviour in the New Testament tells His disciples to turn the left cheek
to be smitten, after they had received a blow on the right; but He was
speaking to people divinely inspired, or whom He intended divinely to
inspire--people selected by God for a particular purpose. He likewise
tells these people to part with various articles of raiment when asked
for them, and to go a-travelling without money, and take no thought of
the morrow. Are those exhortations carried out by very good people in
the present day? Do Quakers, when smitten on the right cheek, turn the
left to the smiter? When asked for their coat, do they say, "Friend,
take my shirt also?" Has the Dean of Salisbury no purse? Does the
Archbishop of Canterbury go to an inn, run up a reckoning, and then say
to his landlady, "Mistress, I have no coin?" Assuredly the Dean has a
purse, and a tolerably well-filled one; and, assuredly, the Archbishop,
on departing from an inn, not only settles his reckoning, but leaves
something handsome for the servants, and does not say that he is
forbidden by the gospel to pay for what he has eaten, or the trouble he
has given, as a certain S