And it is partly because of this dramatic interest that heavy-weights--big men--have, as a rule, throughout two hundred years, attracted greater attention than the little men, except, of course, when little men have fought with big ones. Roughly, it is like this: if you want to see scientific boxing you choose a fight between feather or bantam-weights, if you want to see a good slogging match (but tempered with science, always) you choose a fight between middle or heavy-weights, preferably the latter. Of course, bantam-weights often do slog--much oftener indeed than do heavy-weights box twenty rounds of unexceptionable excellence. But I suppose there is magnificence in sheer bigness, and we like to see the big men fight. And that is why, for the most part, I have chosen heavy-weight encounters to represent the various periods in the history of the Ring. It is impossible, or at any rate quite impracticable, to mention every boxer; it is not even practicable to mention more than a few. I should like to have described the fights of many of the lesser men in point of size--far better boxers, most of them, than almost any heavy-weight that ever lived. Names topple out of recent memory at random--Billy Plimmer, Pedlar Palmer, Joe Bowker, Charles Ledoux, Johnny Summers, Taney Lee, Johnny Basham, hosts of them. But there is one name that simply cannot be avoided in any book about any sort of boxing, the name of one of the best feather-weights and one of the fairest fighters that ever lived--Jem Driscoll. Driscoll, who was formerly Feather-weight Champion of England, having won the Lonsdale Belt outright by three successful contests, had all the natural gifts of the boxer. His weight was 9 stone, or, at all events, generally within easy reach of it; his height 5 feet 6 inches. He was beautifully proportioned, slim, muscular, with the appearance of an all-round athlete. His science was unrivalled, and he was a perfect exponent of what one may still call the English style of boxing; that is, the style based upon the upright position and the conspicuous use of the straight left lead. Driscoll is Irish by extraction and Welsh by birth, and he loved fighting for fighting’s sake from his earliest childhood. He went in for and won various boys’ competitions at Cardiff, and, later, travelled with a booth; his only instructor being experience.