Table-Talk William Hazlitt (epub e ink reader txt) 📖

beat him with his left hand. His service was tremendous. He once played Woodward and Meredith together (two of the best players in England) in the Fives-court, St. Martin’s street, and made seven and twenty aces following by services alone⁠—a thing unheard of. He another time played Peru, who was considered a first-rate Fives-player, a match of the best out of five games, and in the three first games, which of course decided the match, Peru got only one ace. Cavanagh was an Irishman by birth, and a house-painter by profession. He had once laid aside his working-dress, and walked up, in his smartest clothes, to the Rosemary Branch to have an afternoon’s pleasure. A person accosted him, and asked him if he would have a game. So they agreed to play for half a crown a game and a bottle of cider. The first game began⁠—it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. Cavanagh won it. The next was the same. They played on, and each game was hardly contested. ‘There,’ said the unconscious Fives-player, ‘there was a stroke that Cavanagh could not take: I never played better in my life, and yet I can’t win a game. I don’t know how it is!’ However, they played on, Cavanagh winning every game, and the bystanders drinking the cider and laughing all the time. In the twelfth game, when Cavanagh was only four, and the stranger thirteen, a person came in and said, ‘What! are you here, Cavanagh?’ The words were no sooner pronounced than the astonished player let the hall drop from his hand, and saying, ‘What! have I been breaking my heart all this time to beat Cavanagh?’ refused to make another effort. ‘And yet, I give you my word,’ said Cavanagh, telling the story with some triumph, ‘I played all the while with my clenched fist.’⁠—He used frequently to ploy matches at Copenhagen House for wagers and dinners. The wall against which they play is the same that supports the kitchen-chimney, and when the wall resounded louder than usual, the cooks exclaimed, ‘Those are the Irishman’s balls,’ and the joints trembled on the spit!⁠—Goldsmith consoled himself that there were places where he too was admired: and Cavanagh was the admiration of all the Fives-courts where he ever played. Mr. Powell, when he played matches in the Court in St. Martin’s Street, used to fill his gallery at half a crown a head with amateurs and admirers of talent in whatever department it is shown. He could not have shown himself in any ground in England but he would have been immediately surrounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find out in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill lay, as politicians wonder to see the balance of Europe suspended in Lord Castlereagh’s face, and admire the trophies of the British Navy lurking under Mr. Croker’s hanging brow. Now Cavanagh was as good-looking a man as the Noble Lord, and much better looking than the Right Hon. Secretary. He had a clear, open countenance, and did not look sideways or down, like Mr. Murray the bookseller. He was a young fellow of sense, humour, and courage. He once had a quarrel with a waterman at Hungerford Stairs, and, they say, served him out in great style. In a word, there are hundreds at this day who cannot mention his name without admiration, as the best Fives-player that perhaps ever lived (the greatest excellence of which they have any notion); and the noisy shout of the ring happily stood him in stead of the unheard voice of posterity!⁠—The only person who seems to have excelled as much in another way as Cavanagh did in his was the late John Davies, the racket-player. It was remarked of him that he did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball seemed to follow him. Give him a foot of wall, and he was sure to make the ball. The four best racket-players of that day were Jack Spines, Jem Harding, Armitage, and Church. Davies could give any one of these two hands a time, that is, half the game, and each of these, at their best, could give the best player now in London the same odds. Such are the gradations in all exertions of human skill and art. He once played four capital players together, and beat them. He was also a first-rate tennis-player and an excellent Fives-player. In the Fleet or King’s Bench he would have stood against Powell, who was reckoned the best open-ground player of his time. This last-mentioned player is at present the keeper of the Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for a motto over his door, ‘Who enters here, forgets himself, his country, and his friends.’ And the best of it is, that by the calculation of the odds, none of the three are worth remembering!⁠—Cavanagh died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the last two or three years. This, he was often heard to say, he thought hard upon him. He was fast recovering, however, when he was suddenly carried off, to the regret of all who knew him. As Mr. Peel made it a qualification of the present Speaker, Mr. Manners Sutton, that he was an excellent moral character, so Jack Cavanagh was a zealous Catholic, and could not be persuaded to eat meat on a Friday, the day on which he died. We have paid this willing tribute to his memory.

“ ‘Let no rude hand deface it,
And his forlorn “Hic Jacet.” ’ ”

On Living to One’s-Self28

“Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po.”

I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion today (the only thing