d as a common
mutineer; or, it may be, rather as a lion of Asia; which, though caged,
was still too dreadful to behold without fear and trembling, and
consequent cruelty. And no wonder, at least for the fear; for on one
occasion, when chained hand and foot, he was insulted on shipboard by an
officer; with his teeth he twisted off the nail that went through the
mortise of his handcuffs, and so, having his arms at liberty, challenged
his insulter to combat. Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other
avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such howling tempests
of anathema as fairly to shock them into retreat. Prompted by somewhat
similar motives, both on shipboard and in England, he would often make
the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part he played in
its capture, well knowing, that of all American names, Ticonderoga was,
at that period, by far the most famous and galling to Englishmen.

Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde, may
shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England.
True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest
gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord
Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull,
in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness. When among wild beasts, if
they menace you, be a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was
the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to
self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like
him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a
jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain
himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. Nor
should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal
malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and
decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a
Botany-Bay convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case between
the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than
unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals:
imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence
being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its
former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he was right. Because,
though at first nothing was talk