Trial By Lions

That irrepressible Parisien, M. Louis Dolgara, smart critic, minor poet, submitted on a wager, last week, to an horrific sentence which he has often passed on other poets: "They ought to be thrown to the lions." At Le Cirque, de Paris rash Poet Dolgara entered a cage replete with mangy kings of beastdom and sat down to read selections from his poems. He declaimed for half an hour. The weary lions yawned, then dozed, then slept. Triumphant, impertinent Louis Dolgara emerged to jest: "My fame shall be greater than Daniel's! My work has stood trial by lions!"*

-- Medieval "trial by ordeal" was administered to persons of every class, from queens to scullery maids. Thus Queen Emma, mother of Edward the Confessor, walked barefooted and unharmed over nine red hot ploughshares to prove that she had not committed adultery with the holy Alwyn, Bishop of Winchester. Women suspected of being witches were stripped naked and "cross bound" (the right thumb being tied to the left toe, and the left thumb to the right toe), whereupon they were thrown into water, and sank if innocent. British humanitarian, Archbishop Hincmar, dates from the ninth century the notable reform of a rope whereby sunken innocents were sometimes dragged out before they drowned.