Borrow’s defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims defiantly, “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. A woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, who 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.