those exceptions of good-will and kindness, which natural benevolence
and mutual obligation, together with a correct knowledge of each other's
real characters, frequently produce. Even this abstracted hatred,
however, has been the curse of our unhappy country; it has kept us too
much asunder, or when we met exhibited us to each other in our darkest
and most offensive aspects.

Dominick's conduct in the matter of the priest's money was also a happy
illustration of that mixture of simplicity and shrewdness with which
an Irishman can frequently make points meet, which superstition, alone,
without such ingenuity, would keep separate for ever. Many another
man might have refused the money from an ignorant dread of its proving
unlucky; but his mode of reasoning on the subject was satisfactory
to himself, and certainly the most ingenious which, according to his
belief, he could have adopted--that of foisting it upon a heretic.

The eloquence of a country priest, though rude, and by no means
elevated, is sometimes well adapted to the end in view, to the feelings
of his auditory, and to the nature of the subject on which he speaks.
Pathos and humor are the two levers by which the Irish character is
raised or depressed; and these are blended, in a manner too anomalous to
be ever properly described. Whoever could be present at a sermon on
the Sunday when a Purgatorian Society is to be established, would hear
pathos and see grief of the first water. It is then he would get
a "nate" and glowing description of Purgatory, and see the broad,
humorous, Milesian faces, of three or four thousand persons, of both
sexes, shaped into an expression of the most grotesque and clamorous
grief. The priest, however, on particular occasions of this nature, very
shrewdly gives notice of the sermon, and of the purpose for which it is
to be preached:--if it be grave, the people are prepared to cry; but