Very different was the prophecy of this “eccentric barbarian,” Borrow, especially as regards the abolition of the British fist. His prophecy was that the decay of pugilism would be followed by a flourishing time in England for the revolver and the assassin’s knife,—a prophecy which I can now recommend to those two converts to the virtues of Pugilism, Mr. Justice Grantham and the present Editor of the _Daily News_, the former of whom in passing sentence of death (at the Central Criminal Court, on Wednesday, January 11th, 1893) upon a labourer named Hosler, for stabbing one Dennis Finnessey to death in a quarrel about a pot of beer, borrowed in the most impudent manner from the “eccentric barbarian,” when he said, “If men would only use their fists instead of knives when tempted to violence, so many people would not be hanged”; while the latter remarked that “the same thing has been said from the bench before, _and cannot be said too often_.” When the “eccentric barbarian” argued that pugnacity is one of the primary instincts of man—when he argued that no civilisation can ever eradicate this instinct without emasculating itself—when he argued that to clench one’s fist and “strike out” is the irresistible impulse of every one who has been assaulted, and that to make it illegal to “strike out,” to make it illegal to learn the art to “strike out” with the best effect, is not to quell the instinct, but simply to force it to express itself in other and more dangerous and dastardly ways—when he argued thus more than forty years ago, he saw more clearly than did his critics into the future—a future which held within its womb not only the American civil war and the gigantic Continental struggles whose bloody reek still “smells to heaven,” but also the present carnival of dynamite, the revolver, and the assassin’s knife. VI. BORROW’S GYPSIES. To those who knew Borrow, the striking thing about “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is not that there is so much about the gypsies, but that there is comparatively so little, and that he only introduces one family group. Judged from these two books the reader would conclude that he knew nothing whatever of the Lees, the Stanleys, and the most noticeable of all, the Lovells, and yet those who knew him are aware that he was thrown into contact with most of these. But here, as in everything else, Borrow’s eccentric methods can never be foreseen. The most interesting of all the gypsies are the Welsh gypsies. The Welsh variety of the Romany tongue is quite peculiar, and the Romanies of the Principality are superior to all others in these islands in intelligence and in their passion for gorgio respectability. Borrow in “Lavengro” takes the reader to the Welsh border itself, and then turns back, leaving the Welsh Romany undescribed. And in the only part of “Wild Wales” where gypsy life is afterwards glanced at, the gypsies introduced are not Welsh, but English.