No, no--let Paddy alone. If he hates intensely and effectually, he loves
intensely, comprehensively, and gallantly. To love with power is a proof
of a large soul, and to hate well is, according to the great moralist,
a thing in itself to be loved. Ireland is, therefore, through all its
sects, parties, and religions, an amicable nation. Their affections are,
indeed, so vivid, that they scruple not sometimes to kill each other
with kindness: but we hope that the march of love and friendship will
not only keep pace with, but outstrip, the march of intellect.
*****
Peter Cornell was for many years of his life a pattern and proverb
for industry and sobriety. He first began the world as keeper of a
shebeen-house at the cross-roads, about four miles from the town of
Ballypoteen. He was decidedly an honest man to his neighbors, but a
knave to excisemen, whom he hated by a kind of instinct that he had,
which prompted him, in order to satisfy his conscience, to render
them every practicable injury within the compass of his ingenuity.
Shebeen-house keepers and excisemen have been, time out of mind,
destructive of each other; the exciseman pouncing like a beast or bird
of prey upon the shebeen man and his illicit spirits; the shebeen man
staving in the exciseman, like a barrel of doublings, by a knock
from behind a hedge, which sometimes sent him to that world which is
emphatically the world of spirits.
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