Theodore A. Cook

“ To begin it without foil play as an introduction were as futile as learning slides before fixed seats in rowing, but once the preliminaries are mastered an epee pool becomes the true combat of personalities, the keen revealer of temperaments, the merciless arbitrament of skill. It changes with every pair who stand ujp man to man. It can be twenty minutes of the hardest bodily exercise ever known, and it may be either a series of single matches or a combined team fight in sets of four or six. ”

“ But though our amateur fencing championships, with foil, epee, and sabre, are now regularly carried out each year, it may be feared that the art of swordsmanship remains a mystery tp the larger part of the inhabitants of these isles, and that few of the great sporting public know the meaning of the little Tudor rose (commemorating Bluff King Hal, as aforesaid) which hangs at the watch-chain of those who have represented England in an International Tournament. ”

“ A fatal stroke is rarely made by one whose nerves are absolutely calm; it is never made, save in the foulest ways of murder, without the necessity for self-defence at the same moment. It is, therefore, best made as the easiest of simple and instinctive movements. But this was the last thing fencing masters realised. The discovery of the point had fairly dazzled them. ”

“ Emancipated from the bonds of too strenuous utilitarians, freed from the fetters of an encyclopaedic scholasticism, yet glowing, still, with the romance of all its glorious past, the sublimated spirit of good swordsmanship throughout the ages seemed to float over the fencing-rooms of the last decade of the nineteenth century; for here, even in England, the discovery of the French duelling sword ' (or epee de combat) had given renewed zest to practice with its elder sister, the foil. ”

“ We do not believe that the foil will ever die while swordsman- ship remains alive ; but it is a fact that the epee has given an impulse to English fencing of which the foil has never in its whole history been capable. ”

“ This meant that a weapon which nearly always resulted in severe wounds when used in attack was not handy enough alone to provide an efficient defence, and the left hand, with or without a dagger, had to be brought into play to protect the swordsman. This at once involved the disadvantage that adversaries, doubly weaponed, must perforce stand very square to one another, and would risk many chances of grappling and "in-fighting," at which the better fencer might be worsted by a muscular opponent ; science, in fact, made far less difference than it does at present. ”

“ Even the exquisite art and laudable enthusiasm of a Camille Prevost could not, however, recommend to the average militant male a pursuit which he regarded as a mere academic elegance, with very little reference to the serious issues of personal combat and no pretence to the employment of a serviceable weapon. ”

“ But in these days of the- repeating rifle and the Mauser magazine, one army has hardly time to see the manly countenances of its foes throughout a whole campaign, and, relatively, very Kittle bad blood has been spilt when all is over. It has remained for the days of "scientific hygiene" to count more victims killed by disease than fell in action. ”

“ Tho whole continent was agog with geometrical and mathematical theories, with complicated and encyclopaedic treatises, which overlaid the subject with so many extraneous trivialities that all sight was lost of the one deadly principle that simplicity is best, when killing is your game, and when the killer Ls a man of human passions, human errors, human short- comings. ”

“ It must have taken very little time to discover that other men were better slain with some more elongated instrument. At first the flint that flaked so easily into a fatal shape was bound with deers' sinews to a wooden shaft. ”

“ A man who felt as strongly as it has been ever felt the passion he calls "the wild and fiery joy which accompanies actual discovery," Burton equally delighted in the subtler expression of intellectual, tem- peramental, even psychical emotions ”

“ LIFE, as we know it, had scarcely crowned the travail of creation and produced a man when man rose up and slew his brother. That first killing must have been some uncfcanly business, wiili a boulder clenched in an angry fist. ”