Who would not think that the Irish were a nation of misers, when our readers are informed that all this bloodshed arose from their unwillingness to lose a shilling by remaining in Liverpool another night?  Or who could believe that these very men, on reaching home, and meeting their friends in a fair or market, or in a public-house after mass on a Sunday, would sit down and spend, recklessly and foolishly, that very money which in another country they part with as if it were their very heart’s blood?  Yet so it is!  Unfortunately, Paddy is wiser anywhere than at home, where wisdom, sobriety, and industry are best calculated to promote his own interests.

This slight sketch of Phil Purcel we have presented to our readers as a specimen of the low, cunning Connaught-man; and we have only to add, that neither the pig-selling scene, nor the battle on the deck of the vessel in Liverpool, is fictitious.  On the contrary, we have purposely kept the tone of our description of the latter circumstance beneath the reality.  Phil, however, is not drawn as a general portrait, but as one of that knavish class of men called “jobbers,” a description of swindlers certainly not more common in Ireland than in any other country.  We have known Connaughtmen as honest and honorable as it was possible to be; yet there is a strong prejudice entertained against them in every other province of Ireland, as is evident by the old adage, “Never trust a Connaugtaman.”

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.