"Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive." {4}

It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how Byron took
lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton in which
he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how Christopher North
whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats himself never had enough of
fighting at school, and beat the butcher afterwards. His friend
Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His imaginary character,
Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad, who becomes possessed by a passion for
prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, but "the stains are fugitive."

We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and improving
his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving anxious thought
to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested preference, as
fighting was never my _forte_, any more than it was Artemus Ward's. At
school I was "more remarkable for what I suffered than for what I
achieved."

Peter Corcoran "fought nearly as soon as he could walk," wherein he
resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been borrowed
from the author of the "Ode to the Nightingale." Peter fell in love,
wrote poetry, witnessed a "mill" at the Fives-Court, and became the
Laureate of the Ring. "He has made a good set-to with Eales, Tom Belcher
(the monarch of the _gloves_!), and Turner, and it is known that he has
parried the difficult and ravaging hand even of Randall himself." "The
difficult and ravaging hand"--there is a style for you!

Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember that
Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies with