“‘To you I came with kind intent,
Such was my purpose here;
But if on max and swipes you’re bent,
You’ll soon be on your bier.
“‘Henceforth you’ll see this mug no more!
A long adieu, my Fogo!’
He said, and vanish’d through the floor,
In clouds of Oronoko.”
Randall’s pugilistic and personal merits are thus summed up by a contemporary:—In a twenty-four feet ring a better general or a more consummate tactician was never seen: judgment and decision were manifest in all his movements. His heart is in the right place; his head cool and collected, to take advantage in the most prompt style of the disorder of the opponent before him; his mind looking confidently forward to nothing but victory. In short, as a pugilist, he is the Nonpareil. Randall’s style seems the ne plus ultra of the art of self-defence. Out of the ropes, however, he is one of the most simple of human beings. Yet Lavater, with all his knowledge of physiognomy, might have looked at his mug, and looked at it again and again, and not have discovered his real character from the lineaments of his face. If Randall cannot express himself in the sentimental manner of Sterne, gammon the tender path of society with the Platonic taste of a Rousseau, or wind up a tale with the speciousness of a Joseph Surfage, he can be backed against them all for the possession of genuine feeling. A common observer might say he was a rough, illiterate fellow, for he does not attempt to conceal his deficiencies. He has no affectation about his composition—deception does not belong to him, and bluntness is his forte. He is indignant at what he thinks wrong; and is not over nice in his expressions, whenever such a subject is the theme of argument. He admires truth; and his honesty, if not Brutus-like, is as staunch and incorruptible. A liar will be sure to hear of his faults from him. Though education has done little for him, experience has given him “the time of day.” But, kind reader, if thou hadst seen him relieve an ould Irish woman, at “peep of day,” with the only half-crown he was master of, as she was going to market with an empty pocket and basket, anxious to support two of her orphan grandchildren to prevent their going to the parish, when she had solicited him for only two-pence to aid her charitable design;—if you had seen the effect of her plaintive tale, and the blessings she invoked upon his head for this real act of benevolence; his turning aside to weep; and the jeers he experienced from his companions upon the weakness he had displayed;—if you had also witnessed him pushing the crowd aside the instant he was proclaimed the conqueror over Turner, to grapple with the hand of his great rival in friendship, and seen the big tear stealing down his cheek, in admiration of the bravery of his opponent;—if you had known, as the writer did, of his refusal to prosecute a man and his wife, whom he had trusted in the bosom of his family, and who, under the mask of friendship, had robbed him at various periods of £300—I don’t know what you might have said of him, but Burns would have told us, despite his defects, “a man’s a man for a’ that.” And such a man was Jack Randall.
