THE GEOGRAPHY OF AN IRISH OATH.


No pen can do justice to the extravagance and frolic inseparable from
the character of of the Irish people; nor has any system of philosophy
been discovered that can with moral fitness be applied to them.
Phrenology fails to explain it; for, so far as the craniums of Irishmen
are concerned, according to the most capital surveys hitherto made and
reported on, it appears that, inasmuch as their moral and intellectual
organs predominate over the physical and sensual, the people ought,
therefore, to be ranked at the very tip-top of morality. We would warn
the phrenologists, however, not to be too sanguine in drawing inferences
from an examination of Paddy's head. Heaven only knows the scenes in
which it is engaged, and the protuberances created by a long life of
hard fighting. Many an organ and development is brought out on it by the
cudgel, that never would have appeared had Nature been left to herself.

Drinking, fighting, and swearing, are the three great characteristics
of every people. Paddy's love of fighting and of whiskey has been long
proverbial; and of his tact in swearing much has also been said. But
there is one department of oath-making in which he stands unrivalled and
unapproachable; I mean the alibi. There is where he shines, where his
oath, instead of being a mere matter of fact or opinion, rises up
into the dignity of epic narrative, containing within itself, all the
complexity of machinery, harmony of parts, and fertility of invention,
by which your true epic should be characterized.

The Englishman, whom we will call the historian in swearing, will depose
to the truth of this or that fact, but there the line is drawn; he
swears his oath so far as he knows, and stands still. "I'm sure, for my