In 1882 we meet a series of sporting illustrations from the victims' point of view--e.g., a coursing match as envisaged by the hare with a crowd of yelling "sportsmen" looking on. _Punch_ had respected and admired the pugilists of the old school, but here, again, he found signs of decadence. In 1890 Slavin, an Australian, fought Jem Smith in France, and the crowd intervened and ill-treated the former, who won. _Punch_ treats the affair in a neo-Virgilian episode (somewhat in the style of his lay on the Sayers-Heenan contest), which takes the form of a dialogue between "Punchius" and "Sayerius" in the Elysian Fields; and when _Punch_, after narrating the fight, asks the shade of Sayers what he thought of it, Sayers thinks the sooner the P.R. is put down the better. The craze for contests for futile endurance met with no encouragement from _Punch_. When swimming for women was advocated in the _Medical Press and Circular_ in 1878, _Punch_ printed a letter on "Maids and Mermaids" in the style and over the signature of "William Cobbett" vigorously recommending this exercise. But a year or so later, when Miss Beckwith swam for a hundred hours in a tank, _Punch_ registered a vehement protest against these "agony-point Amusements." The spectacle of a girl of eighteen floundering in a tank for a hundred hours at a stretch was to him as objectless as it was penitential, as ungraceful as it was degrading. The exploits of Gale, the pedestrian, at Lillie Bridge in 1880 only disgusted _Punch_, who marvelled at the folly of the promoters of a "stupid, cruel, degrading piece of tomfoolery" in sending him tickets to witness it. "I knew," he says, "that were a horse treated as this man consented to be treated, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would interfere. But there's no Royal Society and no power in the world that can prevent a man making an ass of himself if he chooses to do so." Even in the noble sport of mountaineering _Punch_ found symptoms of a vainglorious love of self-advertisement. His tribute to Mr. Whymper in 1880 is decidedly two-edged. Under title of "Excelsior, Excelsissimus" _Punch_ salutes his achievements with a strong undercurrent of satire, suggesting, e.g., that he should "change his name from Whymper to Crow and take for his crest a Chanticleer _struttant_, _chantant_ on a mountain reduced to a molehill." _Punch_ winds up on the same disparaging note;-- If ever a Gentleman was entitled to advertise himself as "in the perpetual Snow line," Whymper is the man, a self with no Company. We propose that the Empire he has so proudly assisted over the old-established inaccessibilities of the world should be recognized as a higher form of Imperialism--Whymperialism.