; 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 to 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 Spanish cavalier said he was forbidden by the
statutes of chivalry. Now, to take the part of yourself, or the part of
the oppressed, with your fists, is quite as lawful in the present day as
it is to refuse your coat and your shirt also to any vagabond who may ask
for them, and not to refuse to pay for supper, bed, and breakfast, at the
Feathers, or any other inn, after you have had the benefit of all three.

The conduct of Lavengro with respect to drink may, upon the whole, serve
as a model. He is no drunkard, nor is he fond of intoxicating other
people; yet when the horrors are upon him he has no objection to go to a
public-house and