England, two of which terminated fatally, and in two others severe wounds were inflicted. It is, therefore, by no means surprising that it should be imported with other conventional usages from H o m e . But it is a singular fact, that in none of the several duels fought, or pretended to be, in this colony, not one instance has occurred in which either challenger or challenged, or seconds, ever drew blood from the other. N o life was sacrificed, no limb injured to the extent of an adverse scratch, not even the slightest personal casualty witnessed, if I except the incidents where one belligerent skinned one of his o w n toe-tops; another ignited his nether garments, and the coat and hat of others were perforated. It is difficult to account for such general harmlessness in the indulgence of a dangerous practice upon any other grounds than a presumption that the challenges were given under certain stimulating influences, and acted on with an impatience that allowed the nervous system insufficient time to recover its ordinary steadiness, and the eyes to banish the faculty of double vision, which over-indulgence in inebriating fluids is supposed to confer. T h e hand was therefore shaky, the aim uncertain, and the result innocuous. Furthermore, the Port Phillipian duelling was impregnated with an element that would not be admitted into English or Irish affairs of honour, viz., a desire on the part of seconds, concurred in by some of the principals, to turn the affair into a j o k e — a n Antipodean travestying quite foreign to the recognized style in which such matters were disposed of in other places. Ireland was the hot-bed of the Duello during the eighteenth century, and the modus operandi there m a y be quoted as an authority on the subject. At the S u m m e r Assizes held at Clonmel, the capital of Tipperary, a meeting of gentlemen delegates from the great fire-eating counties of Tipperary, Galway, M a y o , Sligo, and R o s c o m m o n assembled (Anno 1777) to settle the practice of duelling and points of honour. In this serious and solemn conclave a code of honour was affirmed and prescribed for general adoption throughout the country, and thefightingcommunity accepted it as a text book. It was an elaborate production, embodying no less than three dozen rules of practice, and was irreverently known as the " Thirty-six C o m m a n d m e n t s . " From a copy before m e I transcribe two of the regulations as relevant to the subject under treatment :— " N o . 1 3 . — N o d u m b shooting or firing in the air admissible in any case. T h e challenger ought not to challenge without receiving offence, and the challenged ought, if he give offence, to make an apology before he c o m e to the ground; therefore child's play must be dishonourable on one side or the other, and therefore it is accordingly prohibited." " N o . 15.—Challenges are never to be delivered at night, unless the party to be challenged intend leaving the place of offence before morning, for it is desirable to avoid all hot-headed proceedings." There is m u c h good sense in these stipulations, which were as a rule utterly disregarded in Melbourne, for the challenges were generally off-hand, the dumb-shooting and air-firing frequent, while such by-play as blank-loading was never once contemplated as a possibility by the fighting authorities referred to. T h e facetiously-termed "hostile meetings" were of frequent occurrence in the early years of the colony, but as no record of them is obtainable, anything like a complete list is not to be thought of, and I a m therefore necessitated to confine m y selection to a few of the more remarkable, as gathered from the old newspapers, though the most amusing of them have been hunted out by personal enquiry of the very few old colonists n o w living, and capable of giving information. THE FIRST DUEL.
It would be difficult to meet with a funnier episode than is to be woven out of the circumstances connected with the first s u m m o n s to the field of honour in Port Phillip; and it is questionable if anything racier ever happened even in Ireland, a country proverbial for powder-burning gentry during the eighteenth and a portion of the nineteenth centuries. T h e Christmas-tide of 1839-40 was a "brighte and a merrie" one, for there was an influx of filled purses from H o m e , and everyone w h o could scrape up anything for a " ran-tan " in town, rushed thither to see " life," and, as invariably happens in certain cases suffer for the transient enjoyment. T h e Melbourne Club was
