Boyle Roche - Boyle Roche's Bird

Boyle Roche's Bird

Roche is perhaps best known for once excusing an absence in Parliament thus: "Mr. Speaker, it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird." This quotation was referenced by Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary in his definition of ubiquity:

In recent times ubiquity has not always been understood—not even by Sir Boyle Roche, for example, who held that a man cannot be in two places at once unless he is a bird.

But Roche was not uttering a malapropism here, he was quoting, and quoting correctly. The line appears in Jevon’s play, The Devil of a Wife, as follows:

Wife: I cannot be in two places at once.

Husband (Rowland): Surely no, unless thou wert a bird.