_Ireland a bastinadoed Elephant._--"And Ireland, like a bastinadoed
elephant, kneeled to receive her rider." This sentence is ascribed by Lord
Byron to the Irish orator Curran. Diligent search through his speeches, as
published in the United States, has been unsuccessful in finding it. Can
any of your readers "locate it," as we say in the backwoods of America? A
bastinado properly is a punishment inflicted by beating the soles of the
feet: such a flagellation could not very conveniently be administered to an
elephant. The figure, if used by Curran, has about it the character of an
elephantine bull.
[Old English W]
Philadelphia.
_Memorial Lines by Thomas Aquinas._--
"Thomas Aquinas summed up, in a quaint tetrastic, twelve causes which
might found sentences of nullity, of repudiation, or of the two kinds
of divorce; to which some other, as monkish as himself, added two more
lines, increasing the causes to fourteen, and to these were afterwards
added two more. The former are [here transcribed from] the note:
'Error, conditio, votum, cognatio, crimen,
Cultus disparitas, vis, ordo, ligamen, honestas,
Si sis affinis, si forte coeire nequibis,
Si parochi, et duplicis desit praesentia testis,
Raptave si mulier, parti nec reddita tutae;
Haec facienda vetant connubia, facta retractant.'"--From _Essay on
Scripture Doctrines of Adultery and Divorce_, by H. V. Tabbs,
8vo.: Lond. 1822.
The subject was proposed, and a prize of fifty pounds awarded to this
essay, by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Diocese of
St. David's in 1821. This appears to me to have been a curious application
of its funds by such a society. Can any of your readers explain it?