Daily National Intelligencer

SPURIOUS CHIVALRY.

We have been much amused by a report of a trial in the Court of King's Bench in London, in which the prosecutor, a merchant, recovered damages of the defendant, another merchant, for having, in the modern acceptation of the word, posted him, because he, the prosecutor, had intimated that the conduct of him, the defendant, "was unlike that of a gentleman or a merchant."

The counsel for the defendant was pleading this provocation as cause why a rule should not be filed against him. The Solicitor-General, in support of the rule, was stopped by the Court.

Lord Ellenborough said, really it is high time to put a stop to this spurious chivalry of the compting house and the counter. The Court has been for these two days occupied with cases of this sort: yesterday it was an angry linen-draper of Bristol, who had been a little time in a local militia, long enough to imbibe all the worst prejudices of the army, that thought proper to post a practising surgeon for not accepting a challenge; and to day we have a mercantile man in the same predicament. Instead of posting their books, these tradesmen are posting one another. The Court desires it to be understood, that it is not necessary for the party applying for a remedy against such an outrage as this, to come perfectly unblemished before them: and that if it shall be shewn to be necessary for public quiet and justice, they will interpose the remedy sought for. If the challenge in this case had been sent co-instanti upon the defendant's quitting the coffee-house, the court would have contemplated it as emanating from the venial irritation of the moment; but it appears that he at first applied to the prosecutor for an apology, upon the refusal of which, his friend, the other defendant, was sent upon this mischievous and malignant mission to the prosecutor in the country; and then, because a man refuses to be hunted down when dining out at a friend's house, and challenged at 6 o'clock in the evening, he is to be posted for a coward at Lloyd's coffee-house the next morning. Rule absolute.