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A certain amount of wildness in a young man is quite proper in the best set, provided that he is wild in the right company. Every one knows that young Lord Datchet was ejected from the Empire Music-Hall on Boat-Race night every year during his residence at Oxford University, but nobody minds. The family treats it as a joke. But James has such low tastes. Professional pugilists!
People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her lord's town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope's hotel. He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might have heightened a rageing scandal. The nobleman forbore.
Like most pugilists he had a passion for bursting into print. Print is the fighter's accolade. It signifies that he has arrived. He was grateful to Smith, too, for not editing his contributions. Jimmy Garvin groaned under the supervision of a member of the staff of his Sunday paper, who deleted his best passages and altered the rest into Addisonian English.
He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly caused his arrest by the police.
Under a management which could announce a Greek agon with flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match; and in presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were workers for hire and of inferior social position were obliged even perhaps against their own better judgment and their own better taste to accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and rudeness.
If Clodius made the streets insecure with his bands, the victorious general likewise set slaves and pugilists to work; in the frays which ensued the general naturally was worsted by the demagogue and defeated in the street, and Gaius Cato was kept almost constantly under siege in his garden by Clodius and his comrades.
Their shrouding linen was frayed and stained. Their features were unimpressive and, in too many instances, shockingly incomplete. They looked very little like kings, and the laudatory recitals of their one-time greatness, translated for the contemporary eye, seemed to be only the vapourings of third-class pugilists.
Before concluding I should wish to deal a little more fully with Professor Max Muller's contention that there can be no reason without language, and no language without reason. Surely when two practised pugilists are fighting, parrying each other's blows, and watching keenly for an unguarded point, they are thinking and reasoning very subtly the whole time, without doing so in words.
But the enemy was a larger and stronger child, and it would have gone hard with the brown-eyed maid had not the minister himself arrived unexpectedly upon the scene and separated the two young pugilists, demanding in shocked tones, "Why, Peace, what does this mean? I thought you were above fighting." "She hit me first!" sputtered Peace, trying to wipe the blood from a long scratch on her cheek.
When a late comer joined them it was considered au fait to welcome him by assuming a fistic attitude, after the style of the pugilists pictured in the barber-shop magazines, and spar a good-natured and make-believe round with him, with much agile dancing about in a circle, head held stiffly, body crouching, while working a rapid and facetious right.
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