mores.’――It is not very creditable to the _élite_ of the Fancy to have abstained from setting-to for the unfortunate fellow; for, although his ignorance may have led him to assume too much, the motto of all professed pugilists should be ‘forget and forgive;’ and ‘if a man’s in distress, like a man to relieve him.’” In the years 1841-2, the magistracy and police, stimulated into abnormal activity by a sort of clerical crusade against the Ring “and all its works,” set the powers of the law in motion against pugilists and their patrons, and “all persons aiding and abetting in riotous and tumultuous assemblages calculated to produce a breach of the peace,” by issuing warrants, holding them to bail, and indicting them at the quarter sessions of the county wherein the same took place. Among the zealots of this Puritanical campaign against the amusements and relaxations of the people, the Rev. Joshua Cautley, curate of Broughton, in Bedfordshire, distinguished himself with the fervour of Ralpho, the squire of Sir Hudibras; though he, fortunately, escaped the cudgellings, rotten eggs, and stocks, which in rougher times befell his prototype. In an evil hour the Deaf’un came in contact with this clerical suppressor of “anti-knife” congregations, under the serio-comic circumstances we are about to narrate. On the 9th of February, 1841, at Holcut, in Bedfordshire, an orderly assemblage surrounded a well-arranged inner-and-outer ring, within the latter of which Ned Adams, of London, and Dick Cain, of Leicester, were contending. At a critical period of the battle, the curate of Broughton, the Rev. Joshua Cautley, who was not, as all the “rurals” surrounding the ring well knew, either a magistrate in the commission of the peace, or in any way legally authorised to interfere, appeared at the ring-side in an excess of peace-preserving furor, and not only attempted to take Adams into custody (without any warrant), but cut the ropes with a knife, and behaved otherwise in an outrageous manner. He was afterwards aided by a police constable (John M’Hugh), and by the arrival of the Rev. Edward Orlebar Smith, a Justice of the Peace for Bedfordshire, previous to whose appearance on the scene certain of the country people present had certainly ejected Parson Cautley from the ring. The Rev. Justice of the Peace, as it appears, then put his fellow clergyman and himself on the right side of the law by reading――at a distance, and amidst immense confusion and the continuance of the battle――the Riot Act. The result of all this was that the zealous Parson Cautley procured, upon affidavit sworn by himself, the constable, and the Rev. Mr. Smith, the indictment of thirteen persons (six of them being his own neighbours) at the ensuing Bedford Quarter Sessions. The pugilists indicted were James Burke, Owen Swift, Edward Adams, and Richard Cain, Thomas Brown (the respected landlord of the “Swan,” at Newport Pagnell, who was there in