A beam of sunshine
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Jump to navigationJump to search- to a beam of sunshine upon a coffin plate Allegedly, the Irish politician and orator John Philpot Curran once compared someone’s smile to a silver plate on a coffin. On the 26th of February, 1835, during a debate in the British House of Commons, Daniel O’Connell quoted Curran, referring to Lord Stanley’s smile, but somehow the phrase came to be mistakenly applied to Robert Peel, who was also mentioned by O’Connell in the same speech. According to the independent researcher S Ball, Curran’s remark was directed against a solemn friend of his called Hoare, and the actual phrase Curran used was like tin clasps on an oaken coffin. But Joyce is unlikely to have known any of these details, and probably assumed, like everyone else, that Daniel O’Connell minted the quote and applied it to Peel.
