the _sword-men_ (so these military casuists were termed) might often
accommodate a bashful combatant with an honourable excuse for declining
the combat:

--Understand'st them well nice points of duel?
Art born of gentle blood and pure descent?
Were none of all thy lineage hang'd, or cuckold?
Bastard or bastinadoed? Is thy pedigree
As long, as wide as mine? For otherwise
Thou wert most unworthy; and 'twere loss of honour
In me to fight. More: I have drawn five teeth--
If thine stand sound, the terms are much unequal;
And, by strict laws of duel, I am excused
To fight on disadvantage.--
_Albumazar,_ Act IV. Sc. 7.

In Beaumont and Fletcher's admirable play of _A King and no King_, there
is some excellent mirth at the expence of the professors of the point of
honour.

But, though such shifts might occasionally be resorted to by the
faint-hearted, yet the fiery cavaliers of the English court were but
little apt to profit by them; though their vengeance for insulted honour
sometimes vented itself through fouler channels than that of fair combat
It happened, for example, that Lord Sanquhar, a Scottish nobleman, in
fencing with a master of the noble science of defence, lost his eye by
an unlucky thrust. The accident was provoking, but without remedy; nor
did Lord Sanquhar think of it, unless with regret, until some years
after, when he chanced to be in the French court. Henry the Great
casually asked him, how he lost his eye? "By the thrust of a sword,"