222 ''I)e Senectuter 



for his own benefit. Chacun a son gout. The writer of the 

 article forgot that all the London papers made a pretty- 

 penny out of Sayers and Heenan within the last twenty- 

 years, and would do so again to-morrow if they had the 

 chance. Now for old Jem Ward. My humble creed is that 

 men who have lived, like Jem Ward, in a rough and ready 

 world, and have followed a calling which abounded with 

 rascality and swindling, and have come out with clean hands, 

 are an honour to their country and an example for us all ; 

 for let us remember how carefully we were brought up and 

 how crooked has been our course in many cases. I remem- 

 ber — reverting to school days — a boy who is now a dignitary 

 of the Church, reading out in Prefect's library, amidst 

 much applause. Deaf Burke's speech on returning from 

 America, in which (exhibiting an American bowie knife) he 

 informed his audience that he would sooner be hung in this 

 world, and —omitting the Deaf un's words, which were un- 

 Shakesperian — would go to everlasting perdition in the 

 next, than see such a weapon in the hands of an English- 

 man. The Deaf un was not much of a preacher, and fell 

 into the Slough of Despond in his latter days, but I say 

 that those words have a wholesome moral ; and I only wish 

 I was a magistrate, or a judge, and had the power of in- 

 flicting punishment on every knifing ruffian. 



On the first occasion of my being in a criminal court I 

 heard old Baron Gurney, at Maidstone, give a jury a 

 tremendous wigging for insisting on a verdict of man- 

 slaughter, when he summed up for murder, in a case where 

 a sweep had quarrelled with a man and had gone away for 

 some time and had got a knife and sliarpened it, and came 

 back and stabbed his enemy; and some years afterwards I 

 read an account of a trial at which Baron Alderson, the 

 kindest and best of men, gave a man a heavy sentence for 

 using a knife, to the best of my recollection in these very 



