Star. — 1830-05-03 (London, England)

DUELLING IN IRELAND.  Duelling had been formerly the opprobrium and stain of this land, whose inhabitants, quick, sensitive, and irritable, were continually coming into collision for some imaginary offence, which it was thought mean and spiritless to explain by either party, till one had killed, or endeavoured to kill, the other. So common, indeed, had it become, that it was the ladder of preferment by which young men rose in their professions, and almost the amusement of every class of society who pretended to the rank of gentlemen. Not only every fox hunt, countyball, and convivial meeting, but every assizes, election, and sessions of parliament, was a continued period of personal encounters. But by far the most intolerable evil, because it came home to the business and bosom of every man, was a set of exclusives who called themselves " Bucks," and who generally were, or had been, military men. These persons frequented all public places, and held it a point of honour to attack eath other, wherever they met, with small swords, like game cocks armed with steel spurs, and every coffee-house, theatre, square, or street, was a scene of their murderous encounters. It is a well-known het, that they have ordered at a tavern pistols for two and breakfast for one, and the survivor coolly returned to take his meal, leaving his companion weltering in his blood at the back of the house. Had this even been confined to themselves, the community could well tolerate the mutual destruction of such a pestilent race; but  " These powdered fops, of new commissions rain, Who slept on thorns till they had killed their man," delighted in insulting and murdering the peaceable and well-disposed. They literally " provoked a brawl, and stabbed you for a jest." They walked about with long trains to their gowns, and the persons who accidentally trod on them were immediately attacked, and run through the body, for their presumption. The first check given to the practices of these persons of quality, was by the execution of George Robert Fitzgerald. This man, of a distinguished rank and family in Ireland, had been the most expert and noted duellist of his day ; and after perpetrating sundry outrages in this way with impunity, he basely waylaid and murdered some persons with whom he had a dispute. Nothing could mark more strongly the deplorable state of public opinion in Ireland at the time, than the difficulty found in bringing to condign punishment this malefactor. He was at length, however, tried, convicted, and executed, to the terror of his caste, and the comfort of all good and peaceable men. His execution was followed up by that of a gentleman of the name of Keon, who was convicted upon the simple circumstance of killing another in a duel. Some unfair practice was alleged and proved ; and he, too, not less to the astonishment and the warning of his associates, was hanged in the front of Newgate, in Dublin, like any other felon. But the person to whom the public in Ireland are more indebted, perhaps, than any other, for putting a stop to the atrocious practice, is Judge Mayne. He was a man of strict religious principles, and was considered as belonging to a sect of Methodists ; he therefore set his face against duelling in any form, not less from a sense of what he owed to the laws of GOD than of man. He attacked the practice in its strong hold, and where, at the time, it was rmnsidered stain on any gentleman, of a certain age, not to have gone out to the field with some antagonist. At the usizes of Galway, a case of fair duelling, as it was called, came before him, and instead of dismissing it in the usual way, he charged the jury with such a solemn determination, that for the first time in that part of Ireland the simple act of duelling was pronounced a capital crime, and the man found guilty narrowly escaped an ignominious execution. From that period the practice happily fell into disuse, even in Connaught. When a man received a challenge, he had the courage to decline it, and, in return, to file a criminal information against the challenger ; and at one assizes, thirteen informations of this kind came to be tried, which a few years before would have probably terminated in so many murders.—British Magazine.