Page:A Sketch of the Life of George Wilson, the Blackheath Pedestrian.djvu/7

 is my humble trade; and had my profession been fighting, I should never have been driven to the necessity of writing, as an alternative to avert the severities of disappointment, resulting from the exertions of your all-powerful authority, by which I was prevented from completing the task I lately undertook, of walking one thousand miles in twenty days, which, had I been permitted to complete, would have brought me the means of directing my poor, but arduous exertions, to a more lucrative and much less laborious calling, at my advanced years, and have enabled me to pay my debts, and to fulfil the duties of a father to four of my children, by rescuing them from the dangers of ill example and vice, and rearing them to honesty and virtue. My ill stars, however, have denied me the happier qualification of a pugilist, which would have secured to me the favour and protection of the great and the fashionable, and perhaps to the mild forbearance even of justicial rigour; I might then have attracted the notice of the Men of the Fancy, as they are called, and have laid my claims to an occasional sprig of those palms and laurels, that have so frequently adorned the brows of the Cribbs and the Molineuxs, the Richmonds and the Gullies, the Dutch Sams and Game Chickens, and all the other men of milling celebrity, who have successively shared the friendship and favours of all ranks, from Princes, Peers, and Parliament-men, down to the coster-mongers of Tothillfields, to their brother amateurs in St. Giles's and Whitechapel; and whose hardy feats have been as proudly recorded in the historic columns of the daily prints, as those of a, and all his brother heroes, who have reaped such har-