DUELLING.
[To THE EDITOR OF THR "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—The descent into the arena of two Royal personages in attack or defence of the time-honoured privilege of travellers' tales may or may not supply a new and unexpected light on the uses of hereditary Monarchy. On this high question I meddle not ; but being a very old man, I recall, probably with 'some confusion of names and dates, the time when Christian morality and English common-sense combined to put an end in our country to the absurd practice of duelling.
I can remember the days when respectable fathers of families pobsessed a case of duelling-pistols, and would talk gravely of / the duty of a man to be the guardian of his own honour. Noble aged btatesmen were at least suspected of practising the • art of taking a good shot; and the great Duke of Wellington did actually fight a duel, and, practical man as he was, took a steady, but luckily not correct, aim at his antagonist. People whispered that the great hero did not need to fight again, and that it was hardly fair on his opponent, who, whatever his wrongs, could not have dared to return the shot in the face of the indignation of the civilised world. As the act was murder by English law, the duellist who had killed his man was wont to go into hiding till a jury had acquitted him, under the direction of a Judge, who would tell them that he was bound to point out that the act was murder in law, but that he must say at the same time that he had never known a fairer duel in all its circumstances. At last, however, a jury returned a verdict of "Guilty," and this was followed by a sentence of imprisonment, which greatly arrested the zeal of duellists. Nor did the affair of Lord Alvanley and Daniel O'Connell produce the feeling in favour of the resort to pistols which might have been logically expected. O'Connell called Lord Alvanley "a bloated buffoon," and re- fused to fight on the ground that, having once killed a man, he had registered a vow in heaven not to fight again. But his son Morgan took his place and fought the "bloated buffoon," who turned it into a joke, and said that, as Morgan had failed to hit him, he had better practise at a haystack for the future. Opinion in the country was, however, becoming serious, and the House of Commons compelled the Commander-in-Chief to issue an order forbidding duels in the Army, and substi- tuting an appeal to a Court of Honour.
But the question had a ludicrous as well as a serious aspect when the quiet and respectable Sidney Herbert gave or accepted a challenge, and the two parties went to Worm- wood Scrubbs, or some other appropriate place, in the same fly—one on the box and the other inside—on a cold autumn morning, I suppose the better to escape the observations of the police. They were duly placed by the seconds, when just as the signal was about to be given, the whirring of a cock pheasant, as be rose startled out of a bush, so alarmed the whole party that they fled from the field and never came back again. Such was the end of duelling in England.—I am, Sir, AN OLD MAN.
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