CHAPTER XXXIII 



CHAMPIONS I HAVE KNOWN 



The portrait of the Game Chicken which Dickens has 

 given in Douibey and Son — " a stoical gentleman in a 

 shaggy white greatcoat and flat-brimmed hat, with very- 

 short hair, a broken nose, and a considerable tract of bare 

 and sterile country behind each ear" — has probably been 

 accepted by thousands as a true presentment of the typical 

 " P'Jg-" N<^ doubt such a type existed, but that all prize- 

 fighters have been of that type I unhesitatingly deny. 

 Young Reid, for example, who taught half the aristocracy 

 and at least two future archbishops to spar in the mid- 

 Victorian era, was a good-looking, trimly built man, always 

 dressed in perfect taste, who might have passed for a 

 professional man. And many celebrated pugilists were 

 really handsome men, with pleasant faces and good 

 manners — the very antipodes of Dickens's Game Chicken. 

 Some of them, too, were excellent company : Jem Burn, 

 Owen Swift, and Peter Crawley were of this stamp. 



Johnny Broome was a particularly clever and well- 

 informed man, with remarkable talents as a mechanic, 

 though his moral character was not quite that of " a plaster 

 saint." Tom Spring was one of Nature's gentlemen in 

 every respect, and I particularly resented Hall Caine's 

 gratuitous and stupid slander on his character in The 

 Manxman, where he is alluded to as having fought " a 

 cross." Mr Hall Caine knows as much about the Prize Ring 

 as he does about the Turf — that is to say, absolutely 

 nothing. I should like to have seen George Borrow's 

 face if the novelist had dared to make such an insinuation 

 against " the unvanquishable and incorruptible " in his 



252 



