In _Don Juan_, canto XI, stanzas xvii--xix, Byron thus describes
one of his _dramatis personæ_.
Poor Tom was once a kiddy upon town,
A thorough varmint and a real swell...
Full flash, all fancy, until fairly diddled,
His pockets first, and then his body riddled.
* * * * *
He from the world had cut off a great man
Who in his time had made heroic bustle.
Who in a row like Tom could lead the van,
Booze in the ken, or in the spellken hustle?
Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bow Street's ban)
On the high-toby-splice so flash the muzzle?
Who on a lark, with Black-eyed Sal (his blowing)
So prime, so swell, so nutty, and so knowing?
In a note Byron says, "The advance of science and of language has
rendered it unnecessary to translate the above good and true English,
spoken in its original purity by the select mobility and their
patrons. The following is the stanza of a song which was very popular,
at least in my early days:--"
("If there be any German so ignorant as to require a traduction, I
refer him to my old friend and corporeal pastor and master John
Jackson, Esq., Professor of Pugilism.")
On the high toby splice flash the muzzle
In spite of each gallows old scout;
If you at the spellken can't hustle
You'll be hobbled in making a clout.
Then your blowing will wax gallows haughty,
When she hears of your scaly mistake
She'll surely turn snitch for the forty--
That her Jack may be regular weight.
John Jackson, to whom is attributed the slang song of which the
foregoing stanza is a fragment was the son of a London builder. He was
born in London on 28 Sept. 1769, and though he fought but thrice, was
champion of England from 1795 to 1803, when he retired, and was
succeeded by Belcher. After leaving the prize-ring, Jackson
established a school at No. 13 Bond Street, where he gave instructions
in the art of self-defence, and was largely patronised by the nobility
of the day. At the coronation of George IV he was employed, with
eighteen other prize-fighters dressed as pages, to guard the entrance
to Westminster Abbey and Hall. He seems, according to the inscription
on a mezzotint engraving by C. Turner, to have subsequently been
landlord of the Sun and Punchbowl, Holborn, and of the Cock at Button.
He died on 7 Oct. 1845 at No. 4 Lower Grosvenor Street West, London,
in his seventy-seventh year, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery,
where a colossal monument was erected by subscription to his memory.
Byron, who was one of his pupils, had a great regard for him, and
often walked and drove with him in public. It is related that, while
the poet was at Cambridge, his tutor remonstrated with him on being
seen in company so much beneath his rank, and that he replied that
"Jackson's manners were infinitely superior to those of the fellows of
the college whom I meet at 'the high table'" (J. W. Clark, Cambridge,
1890, p. 140). He twice alludes to his 'old friend and corporeal
pastor and master' in his notes to his poems (Byron, _Poetical
Works_, 1885-6, ii. 144, vi. 427), as well as in his 'Hints from
Horace' (ib. i. 503):
And men unpractised in exchanging knocks
Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.
Moore, who accompanied Jackson to a prize-fight in December 1818,
notes in his diary that Jackson's house was 'a very neat establishment
for a boxer', and that the respect paid to him everywhere was 'highly
comical' (_Memoirs_, ii. 233). A portrait of Jackson, from an
original painting then in the possession of Sir Henry Smythe, bart.,
will be found in the first volume of Miles's 'Pugilistica' (opp. p.
89). There are two mezzotint engravings by C. Turner.