386 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



I heard of a tailor talking to the gentleman who 

 employed him of personal satisfaction, because his 

 employer cast doubts on the justness of his charge; 

 but looking very blue when the gentleman told him 

 he should be delighted to let the settlement of the 

 account be decided by an encounter. So lax had the 

 code of honour become, and so censorious the world 

 as to a man's declining to fight with any one on the 

 score that he was not a gentleman, that although 

 my conduct might, as a second, have been governed 

 by a nicer discrimination, so far as I Avas concerned, 

 and my second admitted it, 1 resolved to fight, if 

 called on, with the sweeper of a street crossing, if 

 dressed in his Sunday best. The affair in which 

 I was engaged with a Dr. Maginn, since dead, being, 

 at the time, matter of considerable publicity, I take 

 this opportunity of alluding to it, the more so be- 

 cause I have for years seen such erroneous accounts 

 of it given by the press, the last two recently in 

 the " Irish Quarterly Review," that if not noticed 

 in its true colours, the wrong account of that meet- 

 ing: will irain an air of truth ; the real cause of it 

 and its miserable turpitude be lost, and the whole 

 thing be handed down as a political quarrel got 

 up, even according to the " Irish Quarterly," by my 

 opponents " in Mr. Fraser's back parlour, over brandy 

 and water." I do not wish to expose the facts of the 

 case, nor to have to deal with the reputations of tlie 

 dead ; but if I see any more eulogiums passed on 

 those who did not deserve them, I shall be forced, 

 though most reluctantly, to tell an unvarnished tale, 

 and to expose the full extent to which a public 

 reviewer has it in his power to abuse his public duty.- 

 The quarrel arose from no " political feeling," the 



