Period VI.—1825 to 1835.—From the Championship of Jem Ward to the appearance of Bendigo (William Thompson) of Nottingham.
VOLUME III.
Period VII.—1835 to 1845.—From the appearance of Bendigo to his last battle with Caunt.
Period VIII.—1845 to 1857.—The interregnum. Bill Perry (the Tipton Slasher), Harry Broome, Tom Paddock, &c.
Period IX.—1856 to 1863.—From the appearance of Tom Sayers to the last Championship battle of King and Heenan, December, 1863.
In “the Introduction” I have dealt with the “Classic” pugilism of Greece and Rome. The darkness of the middle ages is as barren of record of “the art of self-defence” as of other arts. With their revival in Italy we have an amusing coincidence in the “Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini,” in which a triumvirate of renowned names are associated with the common-place event of “un grande punzone del naso”—a mighty punch on the nose.
“Michael-Angelo (Buonarotti’s) nose was flat from a blow which he received in his youth from Torrigiano,[[1]] a brother artist and countryman, who gave me the following account of the occurrence: ‘I was,’ said Torrigiano, ‘extremely irritated, and, doubling my fist, gave him such a violent blow on the nose that I felt the cartilages yield as if they had been made of paste, and the mark I then gave him he will carry to the grave.’” Cellini adds: “Torrigiano was a handsome man, of consummate audacity, having rather the air of a bravo than a sculptor: above all, his strange gestures,” [were they boxing attitudes?] “his enormous voice, with a manner of knitting his brows, enough to frighten any man who faced him, gave him a tremendous aspect, and he was continually talking of his great feats among ‘those bears of Englishmen,’ whose country he had lately quitted.”
Who knows—sempre il mal non vien par nocuere—but we have to thank the now-neglected art, whose precepts and practice inculcated the use of Nature’s weapon, that the clenched hand of Torrigiano did not grasp a stiletto? What then would have been the world’s loss? The majestic cupola of St. Peter’s, the wondrous frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, “The Last Judgment,” the “Sleeping Cupid” of Mautua, the “Bacchus” of Rome, and all the mighty works of the greatest painter, sculptor, and architect of the 16th century, had probably been uncreated had not Michael-Angelo’s fellow-student learned among “those bears of Englishmen,” the art of administering a “mighty punch on the nose” in lieu of the then ready stab of a lethal weapon.
The testimony of St. Bernard to the merits of boxing as a substitute for the deadly combats of his time, with an extract from Forsyth’s “Excursion in Italy,” will be found at page xv. of the Introduction to this volume; and these may bring us to the period when the first Stuart ascended the throne of “Merrie Englande.”
In Dr. Noble’s “History of the Cromwell Family,” we find the following interesting notice of the fistic prowess of the statesman-warrior who, in after-times, “made the sovereigns of Europe court the alliance and dread the might of England’s arm.” At p. 94 vol. i., we read:—