reminiscences of the nursery and the school-
room, and of soldiers, and prisoners, of
fanatical flagellants, and slaves. It is not
always, however, an instrument of torture.
A sport called Whipping-the-Cock is described
by Grose as having been practised at
fairs in Leicestershire. A cock was tied into
a hat or basket, and half-a-dozen blindfolded
players with carter's whips surrounded it;
and, having turned round three times,
commenced trying to whip it. Whoever struck
so as to make the cock cry out won the game,
and the cock became his property. The fun
consisted in the blinded whippers constantly
whipping one another. The game of Whip-
top is very ancient; not only Persius, but Ovid,
and Virgil, describe whipping-tops. The
passage from the Seventh Book of the Æneid
is thus picturesquely translated by Dryden:—

As young striplings whip the top for sport,
On the smooth pavement of an empty court;
The wooden engine whirls find flies about,
Admired with clamours of the beardless rout;
They lash aloud; each other they provoke;
And lend their little souls at every stroke.

Pooor Robin's Almanac for sixteen hundred
and seventy-seven, sets down, in the
Fanatick's Chronology, that it was then "eighteen
hundred and four years since the invention of
Town-tops." A large top was formerly
provided in every village, that peasants, in frosty
weather when farmers' work was slack, might
be kept warm and out of mischief by playing
at whip-top. The material for the whips was
always dried eel-skins. In the Fifteen Comforts
of Marriage we read—"Another tells
'em of a project he has to make town-tops
spin without eel-skins, as if he bore malice to
the schoolboys."

Every sort of material has been used for
keeping horses in subjection. One maker
has produced riding-whips of black and white
twisted whalebone. Another resolute person,
nothing daunted by the thick hide of the
rhinoceros and the hippopotamus, makes
riding-whips of clarified rhinoceros hide, in
various colours, together with green enamelled
handles of hippopotamus-leather. There is
much ingenuity and elegance in the mode in
which strips of the ordinary material are
disposed around a common centre; each leather
giving strength to and receiving strength
from the others. The nimble fingers of the
whipster bend them over and under, and
between, and around each other with a
quickness that the sharpest eyes fail to follow.
It is instructive to observe how, in a
well-made whip, there is a steady gradation
'from rigidity to suppleness; we can scarcely
tell where the handle ends or the whip begins,
so gently do they blend into each other,
and so neatly is the plaiting graduated from
end to end.

The whip is the emblem of all charioteers,
coachmen, cabmen, omnibus-men, waggon-men,
cart-men, horse-drivers, donkey-drivers,
pig drivers, that ever have been or ever will
be. In the ancient festivals of Bacchus and
Cybele the whip was a distinguished
performer; the priests made a kind of harmony
with whip-cracks. The Cossacks handle their
whips so cleverly that they can produce different
musical tones from whips of different
sizes; and Du Rozoir, a French writer, says
that he has known a coachman in Normandy
who can play an air by cracking his whip.

There must be something very pleasant in
being whipped by proxy—all the sting taken
out. Some of our early princes had a
whipping-boy, to receive castigation as a substitute
for the real delinquent. The father of a
somewhat celebrated Countess of Dysart had
been page and whipping-boy to Charles the
First, in the boyish days of that prince.
There is an old play, published in 1632, in
which a prince (supposed to be Edward the
Sixth) holds a dialogue with his whipping-
boy:

"Prince. Why, how now, Browne; what's
the matter?

"Browne. Your Grace loyters, and will not
plye your booke, and your tutors have
whipped me for it.

"Prince. Alas, poor Ned! I am sorrie for
it. I'll take the more paines, and entreate
my tutors for thee."

Perhaps Dr. Markham had some such
proxy theory in his thoughts, when he asked
George the Third how he would wish to have
his pupils, the young princes, treated. The
King promptly replied:—"If they deserve it,
let them be flogged. Do as you used to do at
Westminster." Whether flogging is good at
Westminster, let the floggees decide; but it
ought to be equally good at St. James's;
and the King thus made a very sensible
decision.

Hudibras tells us of a lady who whipped
her own husband, because he had deserted
the royal standard. In the good old times
women were liberally whipped, not only by
their own husbands, but by public functionaries.
Thus the Corporation records of
Worcester (and many others could make a similar
display) tell us that male and female rogues
were whipped at a charge of fourpence each
for the whip's-man. In one entry there is
a charge of fourpence for whipping a woman;
and in another the charge is no less than half-a-crown;
probably including the hire of the
cart in which the lady was conveyed to the
ceremony. As late as seventeen hundred and
sixty-four, a woman was barbarously conveyed
in a cart from Clerkenwell Bridewell to
Enfield, and publicly whipped at the cart's tail
by the common hangman, for cutting down
wood in Entield Chase. The record gives this
further information; that she was to bear the
infliction twice more, before the full measure
of her punishment would be completed. One
of the rummagers of old Corporation accounts
lias found an entry, in a town in Huntingdonshire,
in which eight shillings and sixpence is