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.
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