in a court of justice. Every people, it is true,
have resorted to the habit of mutilating or changing in their oaths
the letters which form the Creator's name; but we question if any have
surpassed the Irish in the cleverness with which they accomplish it.
Mock oaths are habitual to Irishmen in ordinary conversation; but the
use of any or all of them is not considered to constitute an oath: on
the contrary, they are in the mouths of many who would not, except upon
a very solemn occasion indeed, swear by the name of the Deity in its
proper form.

The ingenuity of their mock oaths is sufficient to occasion much
perplexity to any one disposed to consider it in connection with the
character and moral feelings of the people. Whether to note it as a
reluctance on their part to incur the guilt of an oath, or as a proof of
habitual tact in evading it by artifice, is manifestly a difficulty hard
to be overcome. We are decidedly inclined to the former; for although
there is much laxity of principle among Irishmen, naturally to
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 eleva