“Why, you ould dog!” said the Rapparee, “you can’t hang me; haven’t I a pardon? didn’t Sir Robert Whitecraft get me a pardon from the Government for turnin’ against the Catholics, and tellin’ him where to find the priests?  Why, you joulter-headed ould dog, you can’t hang me, or, if you do, I’ll leave them behind me that will put such a half ounce pill into your guts as will make you turn up the whites of your eyes like a duck in thundher.  You’ll hang me for robbery, you ould sinner!  But what is one half the world doin’ but robbin’ the other half? and what is the other half doin’ but robbin’ them?  As for Sir Robert Whitecraft, if he desaved me by lies and falsehoods, as I’m afraid he did, all I say is, that if I had him here for one minute I’d show him a trick he’d never tell to mortal.  Now go on, bigwig.”

Notwithstanding the solemnity of the position in which this obdurate ruffian was placed, the judge found it nearly impossible to silence the laughter of the audience and preserve order in the court.  At length he succeeded, and continued his brief address to the Rapparee: 

“Hardened and impenitent reprobate, in the course of my judicial duties, onerous and often painful as they are and have been, I must say that, although it has fallen to my lot to pronounce the awful sentence of death upon many an unfeeling felon, I am bound to say that a public malefactor so utterly devoid of all the feelings which belong to man, and so strongly impregnated with those of the savage animal as you are, has never stood in a dock before me, nor probably before any other judge, living or dead.  Would it be a waste of language to enforce upon you the necessity of repentance?  I fear it would; but it matters not; the guilt of impenitence be on your own head, still I must do my duty; try, then, and think of death, and a far more awful judgment than mine.  Think of the necessity you have for; supplicating mercy at the throne of your Redeemer, who himself died for you, and for all of us, between two thieves.”

“That has nothing to do with my case; I never was a thief; I robbed like an honest man on the king’s highways; but as for thievin’, why, you ould sinner, I never stole a farthing’s worth in my life.  Don’t, then, pitch such beggarly comparisons into my teeth.  I never did what you and your class often did; I never robbed the poor in the name of the blessed laws of the land; I never oppressed the widow or the orphan; and for all that I took from those that did oppress them, the divil a grain of sorrow or repentance I feel for it, nor ever will feel for it.  Oh! mother of Moses! if I had a glass of whiskey!”

The judge was obliged to enforce silence a second time; for, to-tell the truth, there was something so ludicrously impenitent in the conduct of this hardened convict that the audience could not resist it, especially when it is remembered that the sympathies of the lower Irish are always with such culprits.