Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/95

70 men, without having professional boxers; and it may be said that the professional boxer who fights an honest fight, with high skill and courage, and without the savagery of rare hands or cestus, is not, thereby, a moral monster and an outrageous example.

Shaw, the British Life-Guardsman, who slew ten French cuirassiers at Waterloo, was a professional boxer; and, undoubtedly, the training of stout heart, puissant arm, and confident eye, that enabled him to do and die like a hero and a patriot, was due more to his pugilistic than his military profession. How many British hearts have remembered Shaw since then in a hand-to-hand fight, and have been nerved to renewed energy by the thought?

"Among the confusion presented by the fiercest and closest cavalry fight which had ever been seen," says Sir Walter Scott, writing of Waterloo, "many individuals distinguished themselves by feats of personal strength and valor. Among these should not be forgotten Shaw, a corporal of the Life Guards, well known as a pugilistic champion, and equally formidable as a swordsman, He is supposed to have slain, or disabled, ten Frenchmen with his own hand before he was killed by a musket or pistol shot."

Poor Shaw! When he died at Waterloo, he