Peace here, if possible; skins were not made for mere slitting and slashing! You that are for war, cannot you go abroad, and fight the Papist Spaniards? Over in the Netherlands there is always fighting enough. You that are of ruffling humor, gather your truculent ruffians together; make yourselves colonels over them; go to the Netherlands, and fight your bellyful! Which accordingly many do, earning deathless war-laurels for the moment; and have done, and will continue doing, in those generations. Our gallant Veres, Earl of Oxford and the others, it has long been their way; gallant Cecil, to be called Earl of Wimbledon; gallant Sir John Burroughs, gallant Sir Hatton Cheek,--it is still their way. Deathless military renowns are gathered there in this manner; deathless for the moment. Did not Ben Jonson, in his young hard days, bear arms very manfully as a private soldado there? Ben, who now writes learned plays and court-masks as Poet Laureate, served manfully with pike and sword there, for his groat a day with rations. And once when a Spanish soldier came strutting forward between the lines, flourishing his weapon, and defying all persons in general--Ben stept forth, as I hear; fenced that braggart Spaniard, since no other would do it; and ended by soon slitting him in two, and so silencing him! Ben's war-tuck, to judge by the flourish of his pen, must have had a very dangerous stroke in it. "Swashbuckler age," we said; but the expression was incorrect, except as a figure. Bucklers went out fifty years ago, "about the twentieth of Queen Elizabeth"; men do not now swash with them, or fight in that way. Iron armor has mostly gone out, except in mere pictures of soldiers; King James said, It was an excellent invention; you could get no harm, and neither could you do any in it. Bucklers, either for horse or foot, are quite gone. Yet old Mr. Stowe, good chronicler, can recollect when every gentleman had his buckler; and at length every serving man and city dandy. Smithfield--still a waste field, full of puddles in wet weather,--was in those days full of buckler duels, every Sunday and holiday in the dry season; and was called Ruffian's Rig, or some such name.