"My name is Peter Peasant, and
you are an impertinent fellow." So saying, he walked out: the
interrogator followed him into the street, where they justled, drew
their swords, and engaged. He who asked the question was run through
the body; but his relations were so powerful, that the victor was
obliged to fly his country, was tried and condemned in his absence; his
goods were confiscated; his wife broke her heart; his children were
reduced to beggary; and he himself is now starving in exile. In England
we have not yet adopted all the implacability of the punctilio. A
gentleman may be insulted even with a blow, and survive, after having
once hazarded his life against the aggressor. The laws of honour in our
country do not oblige him either to slay the person from whom he
received the injury, or even to fight to the last drop of his own
blood. One finds no examples of duels among the Romans, who were
certainly as brave and as delicate in their notions of honour as the
French. Cornelius Nepos tells us, that a famous Athenian general,
having a dispute with his colleague, who was of Sparta, a man of a
fiery disposition, this last lifted up his cane to strike him. Had this
happened to a French petit maitre, death must have ensued: but mark
what followed--The Athenian, far from resenting the outrage, in what is
now called a gentlemanlike manner, said, "Do, strike if you please; but
hear me." He never dreamed of cutting the Lacedemonian's throat; but
bore with his passionate temper, as the infirmity of a friend who had a
thousand good qualities to overbalance that defect.

I need not expatiate upon the folly and the mischief which are
countenanced and promoted by the modern practice of duelling. I need
not give examples of friends who have murdered each other, in obedience
to this savage custom, even while their hearts were melting with mutual
tenderness; nor will I particularize the instances which I myself know,
of whole families ruined, of women and children made widows and
orphans, of parents deprived of only sons, and of valuable lives lost
to the community, by duels, which had been produced by one unguarded
expression, uttered without intention of offence, in the heat of
dispute and altercation. I shall not insist upon the hardship of a
worthy man's being obliged to devote himself to death, because it is
his misfortune to be insulted by a brute, a bully, a drunkard, or a
madman: neither will I enlarge upon this side of t