A voluminous paper war followed this fight, stimulated by “the historian,” who at this period edited a weekly, called Pierce Egan’s Life in London. The “milling correspondence,” as it was termed, became as verbose and inconsequential as diplomatic circular notes or the “protocols” on the Schleswig-Holstein question. Langan, Spring, Tom Reynolds, Josh. Hudson, and Cribb, by their amanuenses, or self-appointed secretaries, figured in print in what they would have called in their vernacular, the “’fending and proving” line; but the great gun was Tom Reynolds, primed and charged by Pierce himself. The very reading of his letters, and weary reading they are, reminds us of the Bastard Falconbridge’s description of the magniloquent citizen of Angiers:—
“He speaks plain cannon, fire, and smoke, and bounce;
He gives the bastinado with his tongue;
Our ears are cudgelled; not a word of his
But buffets better than a fist of France.
Zounds! I was never so bethump’d with words
Since I first called my brother’s father ‘dad.’”
Reynolds proved too much in these letters (several of which serve to “pad” out the bulk of “Boxiana”) by charging conduct upon men whose whole life gave the lie to such imputations.
On the 19th of February, 1824, Langan had a bumper benefit at the Tennis Court, and, at its close, thus addressed the audience:—“Gentlemen, I thank you for the honour you have conferred upon me, and I beg to assure you, on the honour of an Irishman (placing his hand on his breast), if I have the good fortune again to enter the ring, that no effort shall be wanting on my part to make it a more pleasant and agreeable ‘mill’ than the last in which I was engaged. Gentlemen, I am ready to fight any man who calls himself Champion of England, for any sum, from three hundred to a thousand, upon a boarded stage, like this, in the same way as Cribb fought Molineaux.”
This challenge produced the following epistle from Spring to the Editor of Pierce Egan’s Life in London:—