Flagellist

Keats, of the noted Eton school, was perhaps the best flagellist of this century, and it is said of him in Cooper's History of the Rod, that on one occasion, when a confirmation was to be held for the school, each master was requested to make out a list of candidates from his own form.

They hold the head of the defendant, he nowise resisting, upon the ground, and bare his thighs, while the falgellist administers the twenty strokes with a flat bamboo cricket-bat.

I sit with the doctor and his wife at dinner and tell them about my experience with the Indian flagellists.

The Christian flagellist might, it is probable, draw as much blood from his back in a year, as did the frantic priest of Moloch from his sides and arms ; or perhaps more ; but yet it were better done with the Scourge than with the Knife.

A proud, a vain, an envious, a jealous, an uncharitable heart may beat as well under the hair shirt of the self-torturing flagellist as under the purple robes of the monarch ; and Antony in his dreary cell and Simon Stylites on his lonely pillar may have been as far from the kingdom of heaven as the sensual Belshazzar at his luxurious banquet, or the worldly-minded Pilate in his tesselated hall.

Just as we see him assuring the Jesuit flagellist that he will be glad to try penance some other day, or telling us that he did not think it expedient to die for his faith, we see in his work that personal integrity is situational, a performance calculated to appeal to a particular audience.

Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist, the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist.

Many people advocate the tightening of the law both to protect children from flagellists and to suppress flagellant pornography.