18 Tom Simncjs Back Parlour. 



stripped of watches, money, and jewelry wholesale ; and I 

 heard, upon good authority, that an unfortunate foreignei", 

 who wanted to witness La boxe, injudiciously w^ent do\\ai in 

 a new pair of patent-leather boots, and who, after being 

 relieved of all his valuables, was set down on the ground, 

 and some roughs also took off his boots, and left him to 

 get home in his socks. 



The low sporting publican who encouraged little fights, if 

 not a fighting man, was generally a pudding-faced rufiian 

 who could not stand one in the face from a boy, and was 

 much of the same class as those who engaged windows at 

 public executions, and who delighted in cruelty for cruelty's 

 sake. 



How Thackeray delighted to portray the low sporting 

 *' gent," to wit, the slang young man at his club, who in- 

 formed you that he had run down to Epsom from Saturday 

 till Monday, to spend Sunday with Hocus, the leg ; or 

 Colonel Altamont, who went to the Derby in a four-in-hand 

 from Wheeler's of the Harlequin's Head, with a " slap-up 

 lunch in the boot ; " or Sir Francis Clavering, going down 

 in the steamer, and losing his money on Billy Bluck, the 

 cabman, who was killed ; or the sporting parson, the Eev. 

 Bute Crawley, w^ho, in enumerating his nephew RawTlcn 

 Crawley's vices, exclaimed, " Didn't he cross the fight 

 between Bill Soames and the Cheshire Trump, and thereby 

 lose me forty pounds ? " 



Sayers and Heenan created as much sensation as the 

 Crimean War or the Prmce of Wales's marriage. The 

 Times, according to their own statement, sent a rejDorter to 

 the fight for the first time for thirty-six years, and their 

 report, as a piece of graphic description, will be quoted long 

 after most of us of this generation are under the tuif. 

 Their account of that fight opened people's eyes to iLe 

 reality of prize-fighting. It was not couched in the curious 



