r with the cap and
bells of Folly in her maudlin mood,--the marvellous and memorable year
when England--while every forge in Europe was glowing with expectance,
ready to beat every ploughshare into a sword--uttered her famous
prophecy, that from the day of the opening of the Prince Consort's glass
show in Hyde Park, bullets, bayonets, and fists were to be institutions
of a benighted past.

Very different was the prophecy of this "eccentric barbarian," Borrow,
especially as regards the abolition of the British fist. His prophecy
was that the decay of pugilism would be followed by a flourishing time in
England for the revolver and the assassin's knife,--a prophecy which I
can now recommend to those two converts to the virtues of Pugilism, Mr.
Justice Grantham and the present Editor of the _Daily News_, the former
of whom in passing sentence of death (at the Central Criminal Court, on
Wednesday, January 11th, 1893) upon a labourer named Hosler, for stabbing
one Dennis Finnessey to death in a quarrel about a pot of beer, borrowed
in the most impudent manner from the "eccentric barbarian," when he said,
"If men would only use their fists instead of knives when tempted to
violence, so many people would not be hanged"; while the latter remarked
that "the same thing has been said from the bench before, _and cannot be
said too often_." When the "eccentric barbarian" argued that pugnacity
is one of the primary instincts of man--when he argued that no
civilisation can ever eradicate this instinct without emasculating
itself--when he argued that to clench one's fist and "strike out" is the
irresistible impulse of every one who has been assaulted, and that to
make it illegal to "strike out," to make it illegal to learn the art to
"strike out" with the best effect, is not to quell the instinct, but
simply to force it to express itself in other and more dangerous and
dastardly ways--when he argued thus more than forty years ago, he saw
more clearly than did his critics into the future--a future which held
within its womb not only the American civil war and the gigantic
Continental struggles whose bloody reek still "smells to heaven," but
also the present carnival of dynamite, the revolver, and the assassin's
knife.

VI. BORROW'S GYPSIES.

To those who knew Borrow, the striking thing about "Lavengro" and "The
Romany Rye" is not that there is so much about the gypsies, but that
there is comparatively so little, and that he o