Though I deplore the pain you felt When you had broken my command, And I had taken you in hand, Planting my blows beneath your belt, I like to think of future years When skin that’s fair shall change to brown, When ‘listed in a fairer fight, You shall return to others’ ears Blows straightly dealt with left and right, Blows you encountered lower down! PREFACE In the brickwork of a well-known London house, not far from Covent Garden, there is a stone with the date, 1636, which was cut by the order of Alexander, Earl of Stirling. It formed part of a building which sheltered successively Tom Killigrew, Denzil Hollis, and Sir Henry Vane; and that great kaleidoscope of a quack, a swordsman, and a horse-breaker, Sir Kenelm Digby, died in it. Within its walls was summoned the first Cabinet Council ever held in England, by Admiral Russel, Earl of Orford. Its members belonged to a set of jovial sportsmen, of whom Lord Wharton and Lord Godolphin may be taken as excellent types. About the same time, out of the mob that peoples Hogarth’s pictures, out of the faces with which Fielding and Smollett have made us familiar, and in a society for which Samuel Richardson alternately blushed and sighed, arose the rough but manly form of Figg, the better educated but equally lusty figure of Broughton, who first taught “the mystery of boxing, that truly British art” at his academy in the Haymarket in 1747. But, unfortunately, the beginnings of prize-fighting, or boxing for money with bare fists, were more romantic than its subsequent career, for it lived on brutality and it died of boredom. The house near Covent Garden has become the National Sporting Club. Knuckles have been replaced by gloves. To-day we see Carpentier knock his man out scientifically in less than a single round, instead of watching Tom Sayers, with one arm, fighting the Benicia Boy, and only getting a draw after two hours and twenty minutes. Mr. Bohun Lynch’s description of the battle is one of the best I have ever read, and he gives full credit to each man for the fine spirit shown throughout an encounter in which neither asked for mercy and neither expected any.