The Times gives an account of the strange practice of
" flogging Judas Iscariot " which the Portuguese sailors went through yesterday week even in the London Docks. This consists in be- labouring a wooden image of Judas Iscariot, roughly carved, and clothed in an ordinary sailor's suit and a red worsted cap. This image is first hauled into the fore - rigging, after which the sailors go to mass ; on their return it is ducked three times in the water, hoisted on board, kicked round the deck, and lashed to the capstan, when the crew, in a high state of excitement, belabour it with knotted ropes till every vestige of clothing is ripped off the wooden back, when the effigy is burnt. A more barbarous mode of commemorating the mild reproval, " Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss ?" than a ceremony the like of which Dickens invented to ex- press the preternatural malignity of llis hideous dwarf, Mr. Quilp, can hardly be conceived. But Christianity itself assumes in different countries shapes at least as divergent as that of Dickens's brutal dwarf and that of the perfect man.
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