But that which has nearly overturned the system, and routed the whole prophetic host, is the failure of the speculations so confidently put forward by Dr Walmsey in his General History of the Christian Church, vulgarly called Pastorini’s Prophecy, he having assumed the name Pastorini as an _incognito_ or _nom de guerre_. The theory of Pastorini was, that Protestantism and all descriptions of heresy would disappear about the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five, an inference which he drew with considerable ingenuity and learning from Scriptural prophecy, taken in connexion with past events, and which he argued with all the zeal and enthusiasm of a theorist naturally anxious to see the truth of his own prognostications verified. The failure of this, which was their great modern standard, has nearly demolished the political seers as a class, or compelled them to fall back upon the more antiquated revelations ascribed to St Columkill, St Bridget, and others. Having thus, as is our usual custom, given what we conceive to be such preliminary observations as are necessary to make both the subject and the person more easily understood, we shall proceed to give a short sketch of the only Prophecy Man we ever saw who deserved properly to be called so, in the full and unrestricted sense of the term. This individual’s name was Barney M’Haighery, but in what part of Ireland he was born I am not able to inform the reader. All I know is, that he was spoken of on every occasion as The Prophecy Man; and that, although he could not himself read, he carried about with him, in a variety of pockets, several old books and manuscripts that treated upon his favourite subject. Barney was a tall man, by no means meanly dressed; and it is necessary to say that he came not within the character or condition of a mendicant. On the contrary, he was considered as a person who must be received with respect, for the people knew perfectly well that it was not with every farmer in the neighbourhood he would condescend to sojourn. He had nothing of the ascetic and abstracted meagreness of the Prophet in his appearance. So far from that, he was inclined to corpulency; but, like a certain class of fat men, his natural disposition was calm, but at the same time not unmixed with something of the pensive. His habits of thinking, as might be expected, were quiet and meditative; his personal motions slow and regular; and his transitions from one resting-place to another never of such length during a single day as to exceed ten miles. At this easy rate, however, he traversed the whole kingdom several times; nor was there probably a local prophecy of any importance in the country with which he was not acquainted. He took much delight in the greater and lesser prophets of the Old Testament: but his heart and soul lay, as he expressed it, “in the Revelations of St John the Divine.”