The Love of Fair Play, then, where hate is involved, needs a great deal of teaching. I am not trying, in the instance quoted above, to make a case for myself as a lover of fair play in those days. The difference between my enemy and me was chiefly a difference in vanity. He was content to annoy me without risk of hurt or chance of glory. I was ready to stake a bit in order that my victory should be complete for my own smug self-satisfaction. He was the practical fellow: I was the sentimentalist. * * * * * Boxing of a kind is the earliest artificial sport of which we have any record, and the earliest record, and from the literary point of view, the best of all time is, though we are not concerned with it here, Greek. As far as can be discovered there is no tale of any boxing between the gradually debased sport of the ancients and the institution of the British Prize-Ring early in the eighteenth century. And it was not until a hundred years or more later that boxing began to take its place as a topic in polite letters. Under that head it is difficult to include _Boxiana_, or _Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism, from the days of the renowned Broughton and Slack to the championship of Crib_. This was written by Pierce Egan, the inventor of “Tom and Jerry,” and dedicated to Captain Barclay, the famous trainer of pugilists. The first volume was published in 1818. Egan, like many later writers, was often upon the defensive, and was ever upon the alert to find excuses for the noble art. He constantly drew attention to the fact that, whilst Italians used stilettos and Frenchmen engaged in duels _à la mort_, the Briton has the good sense to settle a dispute with his fists. Egan frankly disliked refinement, but he does recognise in boxing something better than refinement. The same point of view is implicit in M. Mæterlinck’s discussion of modern boxing.[1] “... synthetic, irresistible, unimprovable blows. As soon as one of them touches the adversary, the fight is ended, to the complete satisfaction of the conqueror, who triumphs so incontestably, and with no dangerous hurt to the conquered, who is simply reduced to impotence and unconsciousness during the time needed for all ill-will to evaporate.” To return to Pierce Egan, _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for March, 1820, goes in (if the prevalent metaphor of precisely a hundred years later may be allowed) off the deep end in reviewing _Boxiana_:--