Knuckles and Gloves

In the brickwork of a well-known London house, not far from Covent Garden, there is a stone with the date, 1636, which was cut by the order of Alexander, Earl of Stirling. It formed part of a building which sheltered successively Tom Killigrew, Denzil Hollis, and Sir Henry Vane; and that great kaleidoscope of a quack, a swordsman, and a horse-breaker, Sir Kenelm Digby, died in it. Within its walls was summoned the first Cabinet Council ever held in England, by Admiral Russel, Earl of Orford. Its members belonged to a set of jovial sportsmen, of whom Lord Wharton and Lord Godolphin may be taken as excellent types. About the same time, out of the mob that peoples Hogarth’s pictures, out of the faces with which Fielding and Smollett have made us familiar, and in a society for which Samuel Richardson alternately blushed and sighed, arose the rough but manly form of Figg, the better educated but equally lusty figure of Broughton, who first taught “the mystery of boxing, that truly British art” at his academy in the Haymarket in 1747.