CASHEL. This is the face that burnt a thousand boats, And ravished Cashel Byron from the ring. But to conclude. Let William Paradise Devote himself to science, and acquire, By studying the player's speech in Hamlet, A more refined address. You, Robert Mellish, To the Blue Anchor hostelry attend him; Assuage his hurts, and bid Bill Richardson Limit his access to the fatal tap. Now mount we on my backer's four-in-hand, And to St. George's Church, whose portico Hanover Square shuts off from Conduit Street, Repair we all. Strike up the wedding march; And, Mellish, let thy melodies trill forth Broad o'er the wold as fast we bowl along. Give me the post-horn. Loose the flowing rein; And up to London drive with might and main. [_Exeunt._ NOTE ON MODERN PRIZEFIGHTING In 1882, when this book was written, prizefighting seemed to be dying out. Sparring matches with boxing gloves, under the Queensberry rules, kept pugilism faintly alive; but it was not popular, because the public, which cares only for the excitement of a strenuous fight, believed then that the boxing glove made sparring as harmless a contest of pure skill as a fencing match with buttoned foils. This delusion was supported by the limitation of the sparring match to boxing. In the prize-ring under the old rules a combatant might trip, hold, or throw his antagonist; so that each round finished either with a knockdown blow, which, except when it is really a liedown blow, is much commoner in fiction than it was in the ring, or with a visible body-to-body struggle ending in a fall. In a sparring match all that happens is that a man with a watch in his hand cries out "Time!" whereupon the two champions prosaically stop sparring and sit down for a minute's rest and refreshment. The unaccustomed and inexpert spectator in those days did not appreciate the severity of the exertion or the risk of getting hurt: he underrated them as ignorantly as he would have overrated the more dramatically obvious terrors of a prizefight. Consequently the interest in the annual sparrings for the Queensberry Championships was confined to the few amateurs who had some critical knowledge of the game of boxing, and to the survivors of the generation for which the fight between Sayers and Heenan had been described in The Times as solemnly as the University Boat Race. In short, pugilism was out of fashion because the police had suppressed the only form of it which fascinated the public by its undissembled pugnacity. All that was needed to rehabilitate it was the discovery that the glove fight is a more trying and dangerous form of contest than the old knuckle fight. Nobody knew that then: everybody knows it, or ought to know it, now. And, accordingly, pugilism is more prosperous to-day than it has ever been before.