“Can you box?” asks the old magistrate in _Lavengro_. “I tell you what, my boy: I honour you.... Boxing is, as you say, a noble art--a truly English art; may I never see the day when Englishmen shall feel ashamed of it, or blacklegs and blackguards bring it into disgrace! I am a magistrate, and, of course, cannot patronise the thing very openly, yet I sometimes see a prize-fight.” “All I have to say,” Borrow continues later on in _Lavengro_, “is, that the French still live on the other side of the water, and are still casting their eyes hitherward--and that in the days of pugilism it was no vain boast to say, that one Englishman was a match for two of t’other race.” What would he have said had he lived to see a French champion? The two words, “boxing” and “Frenchman,” within half a mile of each other, so to put it, made a stock joke in those days and for long after, even to within recent memory. Borrow had the true boxer’s joy in a fight for its own sake, the violent exercise, the sense of personal contest which is more manifest in fisticuffs than in any other sport. “Dosta,” says Jasper Petulengro, “we’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!” The following is his account of the crowd at a prize-fight, the encounter itself being dismissed in a few lines:-- “I think I now see them upon the bowling-green, the men of renown, amidst hundreds of people with no renown at all, who gaze upon them with timid wonder. Fame, after all, is a glorious thing, though it last only for a day. There’s Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best man in England: there he is with his huge, massive figure, and a face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher, the younger ... the most scientific pugilist who ever entered a ring.... Crosses him, what a contrast! Grim, savage Skelton, who has a civil word for nobody and a hard blow for anybody--hard! one blow, given with the proper play of his athletic arm, will unsense a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized, and also looks anything but what he is, is the King of the Lightweights, so-called--Randall! the terrible Randall, who has Irish blood in his veins: not the better for that, nor the worse; not far from him is his last antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was a near thing; and a better ‘shentleman,’ in which he is quite right, for he is a Welshman.... There was--what! shall I name the last? Ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family still above the sod, where may’st thou long continue--true species of English stuff, Tom of Bedford--sharp as Winter, kind as Spring.