be expected from men whose moral state has been neglected by the
legislature, and deteriorated by political and religious asperity,
acting upon quick passions and badly regulated minds--yet we know
that they possess, after all, a strong, but vague undirected sense of
devotional feeling and reverence, which are associated with great crimes
and awfully dark shades of character. This explains one chief cause of
the sympathy which is felt in Ireland for criminals from whom the law
exacts the fatal penalty of death; and it also accounts, independently
of the existence of any illegal association, for the terrible
retribution inflicted upon those who come forward to prosecute them.
It is not in Ireland with criminals as in other countries, where the
character of a murderer or incendiary is notoriously bad, as resulting
from a life of gradual profligacy and villany. Far from it. In Ireland
you will find those crimes perpetrated by men who are good fathers, good
husbands, good sons, and good neighbors--by men who would share
their last morsel or their last shilling with a fellow-creature in
distress--who would generously lose their lives for a man who had
obliged them, provided he had not incurred their enmity--and who would
protect a defenseless stranger as far as lay in their power. There are
some mock oaths among Irishmen which must have had their origin amongst
those whose habits of thought were much more elevated than could be
supposed to characterize the lower orders. "By the powers of death" is
never now used as we have written it; but the ludicrous travestie of it,
"by the powdhors o' delf," is quite common. Of this and other mock oaths
it may be right to observe, that those who swear by them are in general
ignorant of their proper origin. There are some, however, of this
description whose original form is well known. One of these Paddy
displays considerable ingenuity in using. "By the cross" can scarcely be
classed under the mock oaths, but the manner in which it is pressed into
asseverations is amusing. When Paddy is affirming a truth he swears