On the roll of fistic heroes to whom Bristol has given birth, the name of JEM BELCHER may claim precedence. He came of a good fighting stock, being descended by the mother’s side from the renowned Jem Slack, the conqueror of Broughton, the former being the grandsire of the subject of this memoir. On his first appearance in the London Ring, he was justly considered a phenomenon in the pugilistic art. Jem’s height was five feet eleven and a half inches; his weight under twelve stone. Though graceful and finely proportioned, he had none of those muscular exaggerations in his form when stripped, and still less when attired, which go, in the artistic as well as the popular notion, to make up a Hercules. Jem was formed more after the sculptor’s Apollo than the not-very-accurate classical idea, derived from bronze and marble, of a gladiator. In horse, as in man, this antique blunder is laughed at by those who have read and seen something more than Greek and Latin books or monuments can teach them. The horses of the Parthenon might do for Pickford’s vans, “a black job,” or a man in armour in my Lord Mayor’s show (and they would not carry _him_ well); while Jem Belcher, Henry Pearce, Tom Spring, Jem Ward, or Tom Sayers, could thrash all your shoulder-tied, muscle-knotted, chairman-calved Milos that ever didn’t do the impossibles which ancient poets and fabulists, called historians, have attributed to them in verse and prose. But this is digression, and we return. [Illustration: JAMES BELCHER, OF BRISTOL (CHAMPION OF ENGLAND), 1798‒1809. ] James Belcher struggled into the battle of life in St. James’s Churchyard, Bristol, on the 15th of April, 1781. He there, for some time, followed the occupation of a butcher, and early signalised himself by feats of pugilism and activity at Lansdown Fair.[80] At twenty years of age his skill with the gloves was the talk of the town, and he baffled the cleverest professors of the old school on their visits to Bristol, which were then neither few nor far between. His method appeared so peculiarly his own that it looked like intuition, and some of the “ould ’uns” who were sceptical as to his prowess, would not believe in it until they had experienced in their own persons the irresistibility of his attack and the cleverness of his almost invulnerable and ever-varying defence. Gaiety and intrepidity were combined in Jem’s style with curious felicity, and the rapidity with which he “got in” upon his opponent, the skill with which he retreated, armed at all points, and the masterly manner in which he “got out of trouble,” to the surprise of his assailant, were truly astonishing—in two words, Jem Belcher was a “natural fighter,” perfected by the practice of his art.