and consequently the most ignorant description of the people.  They are also the most numerous.  There have been for centuries, probably since the Reformation itself, certain opinions floating among the lower classes in Ireland, all tending to prepare them for some great change in their favor, arising from the discomfiture of heresy, the overthrow of their enemies, and the exaltation of themselves and their religion.

Scarcely had the public mind subsided after the Rebellion of Ninety-eight, when the success of Buonaparte directed the eyes and the hopes of the Irish people towards him, as the person designed to be their deliverer.  Many a fine fiction has the author of this work heard about that great man’s escapes, concerning the bullets that conveniently turned aside from his person, and the sabres that civilly declined to cut him down.  Many prophecies too were related, in which the glory of this country under his reign was touched off in the happiest colors.  Pastorini also gave such notions an impulse.  Eighteen twenty-five was to be the year of their deliverance:  George the Fourth was never to fill the British throne; and the mill of Lowth was to be turned three times with human blood.  “The miller with the two thumbs was then living,” said the mendicants, for they were the principal propagators of these opinions, and the great expounders of their own prophecies; so that of course there could be no further doubt upon the subject.  Several of them had seen him, a red-haired man with broad shoulders, stout legs, exactly such as a miller ought to have, and two thumbs on his right hand; all precisely as the prophecy had stated.  Then there was Beal-derg, and several others of the fierce old Milesian chiefs, who along with their armies lay in an enchanted sleep, all ready to awake and take a part in the delivery of the country.  “Sure such a man,” and they would name one in the time of the mendicant’s grandfather, “was once going to a fair to sell a horse—­well and good; the time was the dawn of morning, a little before daylight:  he met a man who undertook to purchase his horse; they agreed upon the price, and the seller of him followed the buyer into a Bath, where he found a range of horses, each with an armed soldier asleep by his side, ready to spring upon him if awoke.  The purchaser cautioned the owner of the horse as they were about to enter the subterraneous dwelling, against touching either horse or man; but the countryman happening to stumble, inadvertently laid his hand, upon a sleeping soldier, who immediately leaped up, drew his sword, and asked, ‘Wuil anam inh?’ ‘Is the time in it?  Is the time arrived?’ To which the horse-dealer of the Bath replied, ‘Ha niel.  Gho dhee collhow areesht.’  ‘No:  go to sleep again.’  Upon this the soldier immediately sank down in his former position, and unbroken sleep reigned throughout the cave.”  The influence on the warm imaginations of an ignorant people, of such fictions concocted by vagrant mendicants, is very pernicious.  They fill their minds with the most palpable absurdities, and, what is worse, with opinions, which, besides being injurious to those who receive them, in every instance insure for those who propagate them a cordial and kind reception.