n's
after life--he fulfilled his dukkeripen. 'A bad, violent man!'
Softly, friend; when thou wouldst speak harshly of the dead,
remember that thou hast not yet fulfilled thy own dukkeripen!

There is yet another reference by Borrow to Thurtell in _The Gypsies of
Spain_, which runs as follows:

When a boy of fourteen I was present at a prize-fight; why
should I hide the truth? It took place on a green meadow,
beside a running stream, close by the old church of E----, and
within a league of the ancient town of N----, the capital of
one of the eastern counties. The terrible Thurtell was present,
lord of the concourse; for wherever he moved he was master, and
whenever he spoke, even when in chains, every other voice was
silent. He stood on the mead, grim and pale as usual, with his
bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who _got up_ the fight, as
he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent
boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed
amidst rural scenes, and transformed a quiet slumbering town
into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.

Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more
interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare--the Gill's
Hill Murder, as it was called. Certainly no murder of modern times has
had so many indirect literary associations. Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt,
Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting
fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to
Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the
tragedy:

They cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brain they battered in,
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He dwelt in Lyon's Inn.

Carlyle's division of human beings of the upper classes into 'noblemen,
gentlemen, and gigmen,' which occurs in his essay on Richter, and a
later reference to gig-manhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe's
Works, had their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell,
when the question being asked, 'What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?'
brought the answer, 'He was always a respectable person.' 'What do you
mean by respectable?' the witness was asked. 'He kept a gig,' was the
reply, which brought the word 'gigmanity' into our language.[70]

I have said that John Thurtell and two members of his family became
subscribers for Borrow's _Romantic Ba