George Borrow had no sympathy with Thurtell the gambler.  I find no evidence in his career of any taste for games of hazard or indeed for games of any kind, although we recall that as a mere¹ child he was able to barter² a pack of cards for the Irish language.  But he had certainly very considerable sympathy with the notorious criminal as a friend and patron of prize-fighting.  This now discredited⁴ pastime Borrow ever counted a virtue⁵.  Was not his God-fearing father a champion in his way, or, at least, had he not in open fight beaten the champion of the moment, Big Ben Brain?  Moreover, who was there in those days with blood in his veins⁶ who did not count the cultivation⁷ of the Fancy as the noblest and most manly⁸ of pursuits!  Why, William Hazlitt, a prince among English essayists, whose writings are a beloved classic in our day, wrote in The New Monthly Magazine in these very years his own eloquent⁹ impression, and even introduces John Thurtell more than once as “Tom Turtle,” little thinking then of the fate that was so soon to overtake him.  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 monograph¹⁰ on John Jackson, the pugilist who taught Lord Byron to box, and received the immortality¹¹ of an eulogistic¹² 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 antidote¹³ to these slanderers that we pen a candid¹⁴ history of the boxers¹⁵; and taking the general habits of men of humble¹⁶ origin (elevated by their courage and bodily gifts to be the associates of those more fortunate in worldly position), we fearlessly maintain that p. 75the best of our boxers present as good samples of honesty, generosity¹⁷ of spirit, goodness of heart and humanity, as an equal number of men of any class of society.
 
From Samuel Johnson onwards literary England has had a kindness for the pugilist, although the magistrate¹⁸ 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 accomplishment¹⁹ as a distributor of Bibles and ignores his delight in fisticuffs, has any grasp of the real George Borrow.  Indeed it may be said, and will be shown in the course of our story, that Borrow entered upon Bible distribution in the spirit of a pugilist rather than that of an evangelist.  But to return to Borrow’s pugilistic experiences.  He claims, as we have seen, occasionally to have put on the gloves with John Thurtell.  He describes vividly²⁰ enough his own conflicts with the Flaming Tinman and with Petulengro.  His one heroine, Isopel Berners, had “Fair Play and Long Melford” as her ideal, “Long Melford” being the good right-handed blow with which Lavengro conquered the Tinman.  Isopel, we remember, had learned in Long Melford union to “Fear God and take your own part!”
 
George Borrow, indeed, was at home with the whole army of prize-fighters, who came down to us like the Roman Caesars or the Kings of England in a noteworthy procession, their dynasty commencing with James Fig³ of Thame, who began to reign²¹ in 1719, and closing with Tom King, who beat Heenan in 1863, or with Jem Mace²², who flourished in a measure until 1872.  With what zest²³ must Borrow have followed the account of the greatest battle of all, that between Heenan and Tom Sayers at Farnborough in 1860, when it was said that Parliament had been emptied to patronise a prize-fight; and this although Heenan complained that he had been chased out of eight counties.  For by this time, in spite of lordly patronage²⁴, pugilism was doomed²⁵, and the more harmless boxing had taken its place.&nbs............