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.”
His usual practice was, when the family came home at night from their labour, to stretch himself upon two chairs, his head resting upon the hob, with a boss for a pillow, his eyes closed, as a proof that his mind was deeply engaged with the matter in hand. In this attitude he got some one to read the particular prophecy upon which he wished to descant; and a most curious and amusing entertainment it generally was to hear the text, and his own singular and original commentaries upon it. That he must have been often hoaxed by wags and wits, was quite evident from the startling travesties of the text which had been put into his mouth, and which, having been once put there, his tenacious memory never forgot.
The fact of Barney’s arrival in the neighbourhood soon went abroad, and the natural consequence was, that the house in which he thought proper to reside for the time became crowded every night as soon as the hours of labour had passed, and the people got leisure to hear him. Having thus procured him an audience, it is full time that we should allow the fat old Prophet to speak for himself, and give us all an insight into futurity.
“Barney, ahagur,” the good man his host would say, “here’s a lot o’ the neighbours come to hear a whirrangue from you on the Prophecies; and, sure, if you can’t give it to them, who is there to be found that can?”
“Throth, Paddy Traynor, although I say it that should not say it, there’s truth in that, at all evints. The same knowledge has cost me many a weary blisthur an’ sore heel in huntin’ it up an’ down, through mountain an’ glen, in Ulsther, Munsther, Leinsther, an’ Connaught—not forgettin’ the Highlands of Scotland, where there’s what they call the ‘short prophecy,’ or second sight, but wherein there’s afther all but little of the Irish or long prophecy, that regards what’s to befall the winged woman that flown into the wilderness. No, no—their second sight isn’t thrue prophecy at all. If a man goes out to fish, or steal a cow, an’ that he happens to be drowned or shot, another man that has the second sight will see this in his mind about or afther the time it happens. Why, that’s little. Many a time our own Irish drames are aiqual to it; an’ indeed I have it from a knowledgeable man, that the gift they boast of has four parents—an empty stomach, thin air, a weak head, an’ strong whisky, an’ that a man must have all these, espishilly the last, before he can have the second sight properly; an’ it’s my own opinion. Now, I have a little book (indeed I left my books with a friend down at Errigle) that contains a prophecy of the milk-white hind an’ the bloody panther, an’ a forebodin’ of the slaughter there’s to be in the Valley of the Black Pig, as foretould by Beal Derg, or the prophet wid the red mouth, who never was known to speak but when he prophesied, or to prophesy but when he spoke.”
“The Lord bless an’ keep us!—an’ why was he called the Man wid the Red Mouth, Barney?”
“I’ll tell you that: first, bekase he always prophesied about the slaughter an’ fightin’ that was to take place in the time to come; an’, secondly, bekase, while he spoke, the red blood always trickled out of his mouth, as a proof that what he foretould was true.”
“Glory be to God! but that’s wondherful all out. Well, well!”