NOBLE ART OF SELF-DEFENCE 247 



London leg tried to draw from him twice, the bet having 

 been paid on the course, when Hope Johnstone gave the 

 ruffian a hiding which he remembered for a month of 

 Sundays. 



Johnstone's best Turf spec was buying Era out of Scotts' 

 stables for a mere trifle, and afterwards winning the 

 Northumberland Plate, the Liverpool Cup, and other first- 

 class races with him, though the Scotts were never able to 

 make the horse gallop at all. He also had a good animal 

 in William le Gros, on which he himself beat British 

 Yeoman at Doncaster, in a match for looo guineas. 

 It was said of him in 1849 that, "with the air of a raw 

 heather laird and the accent of a drover this Northern 

 Turfite combined naturally acute wits that made him more 

 than a match for the cleverest legs about town ; whilst his 

 infernal knuckles and readiness to use them were not with- 

 out their influence in the pandemonia of the metropolis." 



That most earnest philanthropist, the late Earl of Shaftes- 

 bury, was a famous boxer in his younger days ; and when 

 he opened the Exeter Hall Gymnasium he gave some 

 reminiscences of his youthful fights, in which he evidently 

 revelled, much to the horror of some of the audience. The 

 Earl's elder brother, the Hon. Francis Ashley Cooper, was 

 killed in a fight at Eton by a school-fellow named Fred 

 Wood. They fought for more than two hours, and Cooper 

 died the same evening. 



Few people who were familiar with the slight frame and 

 ascetic face of Cardinal Manning would imagine that in his 

 youth he was a cricketer of no mean proficiency, and, like 

 Lord Shaftesbury, a particularly clever boxer. He could 

 hold his own with his gloves in very good company, and a 

 priest who was trained under him told a friend of mine that 

 when he grew demonstrative in the pulpit, he had a knack 

 of throwing his body into the correct pugilistic attitude. 

 And this reminds me that one of the highest tributes ever 

 paid to British boxing came from another Cardinal, an 

 Italian. 



In a sermon which he preached in Rome at the end of 

 the last century on the cowardice of using the stiletto, the 

 Cardinal said, " Why do you not fight like the brave 



