What could be more lyrical than this: Reader, have you ever seen a fight?
If not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill Neate.
And then the best historian of prize-fighting, Henry Downes Miles, the author of _Pugilistica_, has his own statement of the case.

You will find it in his monograph on John Jackson, the pugilist who taught Lord Byron to box, and received the immortality of an eulogistic footnote in _Don Juan_.

Here is Miles's defence: No small portion of the public has taken it for granted that pugilism and blackguardism are synonymous.

It is as an antidote to these slanderers that we pen a candid history of the boxers; and taking the general habits of men of humble origin (elevated by their courage and bodily gifts to be the associates of those more fortunate in worldly position), we fearlessly maintain that the best of our boxers present as good samples of honesty, generosity of spirit, goodness of heart and humanity, as an equal number of men of any class of society.
From Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw literary England has had a kindness for the pugilist, although the magistrate has long, and rightly, ruled him out as impossible.

Borrow carried his enthusiasm further than any, and no account of him that concentrates attention upon his accomplishment as a distributor of Bibles and ignores his delight in fisticuffs, has any grasp of the real George Borrow.