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John Langan, one of the bravest of pugilists—and whose fortune it was to find his ambition foiled when struggling to the topmost round of the ladder, by the superior skill of Tom Spring, the English Champion—well deserves a chapter in the History of Pugilism. As the author of “Boxiana” was not only the countryman but the personal friend of Langan, we shall accept, with a few alterations and additions, the biography of “the Irish Champion,” as we find it in that work; and for the further reason that it is, in its earlier pages, a lively and amusing specimen of “the historian’s” apocrypha.

John Langan was born in the month of May, 1798, at Clondalton, in the county Kildare. Ireland was then in the full blaze of insurrection, and Pierce Egan tells us “that young Paddy had scarcely become one of his father’s family five minutes, before his ears were saluted by a tremendous fire of musketry from a party of United Men who were attempting to get possession of a powder-mill situated within fifty yards of his daddy’s mud edifice.” Mrs. Judy O’Shaughnessy, his nurse, had her own way of explaining this as rather ominous that little Jack Langan was born to make a noise in the world. The early years of little Jack passed as is usual with lively urchins, until his father left Clondalton, and settled in the suburbs of Dublin, at a place called Ballybough Lane, adjoining that beautiful spot of freedom known as Mud Island.