o ran up the
burning stairs." And so he goes on, overwhelming his opponents with a
tornado of generalities that have nothing whatever to do with
prize-fighting, and yet how delightful it all is!

There were other critics--Borrow always had plenty of critics--who found
it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his
denunciation in one passage of "those disgraceful and brutalising
exhibitions called pugilistic combats." The explanation has been
suggested that for once the "John Bull" Borrow, with his patriotic
exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent
of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It would be hard to find a
writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a
man of "moods" that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a
hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do
not tally with a superhuman exactitude.

But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he
drank on his Welsh rambles--and has not "Wild Wales" been called "The
Epic of Ale?"--or his associations with the great fighting-men of his
day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the
men. "Why should I hide the truth?" he asks, when telling of his
presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near
Norwich. Thurtell, whose boast it was that he had introduced bruising
into East Anglia, had arranged the fight, which was ever after memorable
to Borrow for the appearance on the scene of Gipsy Will and his
celebrated gang. This well-known Romany, who was afterwards hanged
outside the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds for a murder committed in his youth,
was a sturdy, muscular fellow, six feet in height, who rendered himself
especially noticeable by wearing a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian
hat. He was anxious on this occasion to fight the best man in England
for twenty pounds (not a very tempting sum in the light of our more
advanced days); but no one accepted the challenge, though a young
countryman was anxious to do so until assured by his friends that the
notorious gipsy would certainly kill him.

Borrow has gone out of his way in "The Gipsies of Spain" to give a full
description of this Gipsy Will and his notable companions. At the risk
of wearying some readers who deprecate the prize-ring and its
cosmopolitan environment, the writer quotes something of this
description, as it appear