of houses." Among the gentlemen present, as the same frank-spoken witness testifies, were "the Duke of Kent, Mr. Wyndham, Lord Archibald Hamilton (a famous hand, I am told), Lord Kinnaird, Mr. T. Sheridan, &c. &c., and all the fighting-men in town, of course." These last, we read further, were "the Game Chicken, Woods, Tring, Pitloon, &c. Captain Barclay of Urie received us, and put us across the river in a boat, and he followed with Cribb, whom he backed at all hands. The Hon. Barclay (Berkeley) Craven was the judge." This charming chronicler proceeds to tell us that the odds were on Belcher, but that the hero in question, after a long fight, "was at length obliged to give in." Poor fellow! Modern adherents to the theory that fisticuffs had any early origin in Great Britain may be consoled for the decadence of the "good old national art of self-defence" by the assurance that boxing was a practice which endured little more than a century and a half, if so long, and was learnt from North American savages. Its real antiquity is Greek, the grounds for believing that the Anglo-Saxons, and, after them, the Plantagenets, favoured this form of pugilism being extremely slender. The English prize-fighters of the eighteenth century encountered one another with broadswords. There are other "arts of self-defence" far better entitled to rank as English than boxing. The quarter-staff is one. [Illustration: GARRICK'S VILLA, HAMPTON.] On the road to Moulsey from Walton-on-Thames stands Apps Court, or the modern representative of that capital mansion, once inhabited by Mrs. or Miss Catherine Barton, who might have been called a "professional beauty" had the phrase, together with photography, been invented in her day. The manor was bequeathed to her for life by Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax. She was a reigning "toast," and her name frequently occurs in Swift's journal to Stella. Catherine Barton, who was a sort of niece to Sir Isaac Newton, being, in fact, the daughter of his half-sister, has been spoken of as the mistress of Lord Halifax; though it is now pretty clearly established that she was privately married to him, before his elevation to the peerage. She afterwards married a master of the Mint, who succeeded in that office her illustrious uncle. Many other persons of note are historically associated with "delightful Ab's Court," so designated by Pope, in his Horatian epistle to one of its proprietors, Colonel Cotterell. The grounds, like most of the Thames pleasances, contain some grand timber; oaks and elms being conspicuous objects. A little past Moulsey Lock is Hampton Court Bridge, a five-arched iron structure, by which we take our way to the palace and its famous grounds. /Godfrey Turner/. [Illustration: THE APPROACH TO HAMPTON COURT.] CHAPTER VIII. HAMPTON COURT TO RICHMOND.