their
fists? The writer believes not. A fisty combat is at present a great
rarity, but the use of the knife, the noose, and of poison, to say
nothing of calumny, are of more frequent occurrence in England than
perhaps in any country in Europe. Is polite taste better than when it
could bear the details of a fight? The writer believes not. Two men
cannot meet in a ring to settle a dispute in a manly manner without some
trumpery local newspaper letting loose a volley of abuse against "the
disgraceful exhibition," in which abuse it is sure to be sanctioned by
its dainty readers; whereas some murderous horror, the discovery, for
example, of the mangled remains of a woman in some obscure den, is
greedily seized hold on by the moral journal, and dressed up for its
readers, who luxuriate and gloat upon the ghastly dish. Now, the writer
of Lavengro has no sympathy with those who would shrink from striking a
blow, but would not shrink from the use of poison or calumny; and his
taste has little in common with that which cannot tolerate the hardy
details of a prize-fight, but which luxuriates on descriptions of the
murder dens of modern England. But prize-fighters and pugilists are
blackguards, a reviewer has said; and blackguards they would be provided
they employed their skill and their prowess for purposes of brutality and
oppression; but prize-fighters and pugilists are seldom friends to
brutality and oppression; and which is the blackguard, the writer would
ask, he who uses his fists to take his own part, or instructs others to
use theirs for the same purpose, or the being who from envy and malice,
or at the bidding of a malicious scoundrel, endeavours by calumny,
falsehood, and misrepresentation to impede the efforts of lonely and
unprotected genius?

One word more about the race, all but extinct, of the people
opprobriously called prize-fighters. Some of them have been as noble,
kindly men as the world ever produced. Can the rolls of the English
aristocracy exhibit names belonging to more noble, more heroic men than
those who were called respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever
one of the English aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by
rushing up the stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret,
and rescuing a woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer
says No. A woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the
man who rescued her was no aristocrat; it was