From this period to that of his death, on the 20th of August, 1851, Spring dispensed the hospitalities of the Castle, never losing a friend, except by the hand of death. In his later days, family difficulties, and too great a confidence in self-styled friends, who induced him to execute turf commissions, and when the thing went wrong were absentees or defaulters, added to his embarrassments. Still he held on, universally respected by all who knew him until his 56th year, when pale death struck him down somewhat suddenly, the blow being dealt through a heart disease of some years’ standing. His funeral took place with becoming solemnity on Sunday, the 25th of August, 1851, his remains being followed by several mourning coaches and other carriages to the grave. In the first carriage were his only surviving son, Melchior Winter; Mr. Price, of Hereford, his solicitor and executor; his firm friend, Mr. Elbam, of Piccadilly; and the writer of these pages. Poor Tom lies buried in the Norwood Cemetery, beneath the monument which we have here engraved. “Peace be to his manes!” Few men who have led a public life have less reason to dread the last call of “Time,” than Thomas Winter Spring. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. JOHN LANGAN, THE IRISH CHAMPION—1819–1824. John Langan, one of the bravest of pugilists—and whose fortune it was to find his ambition foiled when struggling to the topmost round of the ladder, by the superior skill of Tom Spring, the English Champion—well deserves a chapter in the History of Pugilism. As the author of “Boxiana” was not only the countryman but the personal friend of Langan, we shall accept, with a few alterations and additions, the biography of “the Irish Champion,” as we find it in that work; and for the further reason that it is, in its earlier pages, a lively and amusing specimen of “the historian’s” apocrypha. John Langan was born in the month of May, 1798, at Clondalton, in the county Kildare. Ireland was then in the full blaze of insurrection, and Pierce Egan tells us “that young Paddy had scarcely become one of his father’s family five minutes, before his ears were saluted by a tremendous fire of musketry from a party of United Men who were attempting to get possession of a powder-mill situated within fifty yards of his daddy’s mud edifice.” Mrs. Judy O’Shaughnessy, his nurse, had her own way of explaining this as rather ominous that little Jack Langan was born to make a noise in the world. The early years of little Jack passed as is usual with lively urchins, until his father left Clondalton, and settled in the suburbs of Dublin, at a place called Ballybough Lane, adjoining that beautiful spot of freedom known as Mud Island.