Excuse me. I have other views.
I’ve noted in this man such aptitude
For art and exercise in his defence
That I prognosticate for him a future
More glorious than my past. Henceforth I dub him
The Admirable Bashville, Byron’s Novice;
And to the utmost of my mended fortunes
Will back him ’gainst the world at ten stone six.
Hail, Byron’s Novice, champion that shall be!
Must I renounce my lovely lady’s service,
And mar the face of man?
’Tis Fate’s decree.
For know, rash youth, that in this star crost world
Fate drives us all to find our chiefest good
In what we can, and not in what we would.
A post-horn—hark!
What noise of wheels is this?
Perfidious peer!
Sweet Adelaide—
Forbear,
Audacious one: my name is Mrs. Byron.
Oh, change that title for the sweeter one
Of Lady Worthington.
Unhappy man,
You know not what you do.
Nay, ’tis a match
Of most auspicious promise. Dear Lord Worthington,
You tear from us our mother-in-law—
Ha! True.
—but we will make the sacrifice. She blushes:
At least she very prettily produces
Blushing’s effect.
My lord: I do accept you.
Aside.
It wrings my heart to see my noble backer
Lay waste his future thus. The world’s a chessboard,
And we the merest pawns in fist of Fate.
Aloud. And now, my friends, gentle and simple both,
Our scene draws to a close. In lawful course
As Dorset’s deputy lieutenant I
Do pardon all concerned this afternoon
In the late gross and brutal exhibition
Of miscalled sport.
Throwing herself into his arms.
Your boats are burnt at last.
This is the face that burnt a thousand boats,
And ravished Cashel Byron from the ring.
But to conclude. Let William Paradise
Devote himself to science, and acquire,
By studying the player’s speech in Hamlet,
A more refined address. You, Robert Mellish,
To the Blue Anchor hostelry attend him;
Assuage his hurts, and bid Bill Richardson
Limit his access to the fatal tap.
Now mount we on my backer’s four-in-hand,
And to St. George’s Church, whose portico
Hanover Square shuts off from Conduit Street,
Repair we all. Strike up the wedding march;
And, Mellish, let thy melodies trill forth
Broad o’er the wold as fast we bowl along.
Give me the post-horn. Loose the flowing rein;
And up to London drive with might and main.
Note on Modern Prizefighting
In 1882, when this book was written, prizefighting seemed to be dying out. Sparring matches with boxing gloves, under the Queensberry rules, kept pugilism faintly alive; but it was not popular, because the public, which cares only for the excitement of a strenuous fight, believed then that the boxing glove made sparring as harmless a contest of pure skill as a fencing match with buttoned foils. This delusion was supported by the limitation of the sparring match to boxing. In the prize-ring under the old rules a combatant might trip, hold, or throw his antagonist; so that each round finished either with a knockdown blow, which, except when it is really a liedown blow, is much commoner in fiction than it was in the ring, or with a visible body-to-body struggle ending in a fall. In a sparring match all that happens is that a man with a watch in his hand cries out “Time!” whereupon the two champions prosaically stop sparring and sit down for a minute’s rest and refreshment. The unaccustomed and inexpert spectator in those days did not appreciate the severity of the exertion or the risk of getting hurt: he underrated them as ignorantly as he would have overrated the more dramatically obvious terrors of a prizefight. Consequently the interest in the annual sparrings for the Queensberry Championships was confined to the few amateurs who had some critical knowledge of the game of boxing, and to the survivors of the generation for which the fight between Sayers and Heenan had been described in The Times as solemnly as the University Boat Race. In short, pugilism was out of fashion because the police had suppressed the only form of it which fascinated the public by its undissembled pugnacity.
All that was needed to rehabilitate it was the discovery that the glove fight is a more trying and dangerous form of contest than the old knuckle fight. Nobody knew that then: everybody knows it, or ought to know it, now. And, accordingly, pugilism is more prosperous today than it has ever been before.
How far this result was foreseen by the author of the Queensberry Rules, which superseded those of the old prize-ring, will probably never be known. There is no doubt that they served their immediate turn admirably. That turn was, the keeping alive of boxing in the teeth of the law against prizefighting. Magistrates believed, as the public believed, that when men’s knuckles were muffled in padded gloves; when they were forbidden to wrestle or hold one another; when the duration of a round was fixed by the clock, and the number of rounds limited to what seems (to those who have never tried) to be easily within the limits of ordinary endurance; and when the traditional interval for rest between the rounds was doubled, that then indeed violence must be checkmated, so that the worst the boxers could do was to “spar for points” before three gentlemanly members of the Stock Exchange, who would carefully note the said points on an examination paper at the ring side, awarding marks only for skill and elegance, and sternly discountenancing the claims of brute force. It may be that both the author of the rules and the “judges” who administered them in the earlier days really believed all this; for, as far as I know, the limit of an amateur pugilist’s romantic credulity has never yet been reached and probably never will. But if so, their good intentions were upset by the operation of a single new rule. Thus.
In the old prize-ring a round had no fixed duration. It was terminated by the fall of
