Then the too frequent preparations for a Newgate execution—­but enough of such details; it is the muse of Mr. Crabbe that alone could do them justice.  We would say to the great city, in the benedictory spirit of the patriot of Venice,—­esto perpetua! Notwithstanding thy manifold “honest knaveries,” peace be within thy walls, and plenty pervade thy palaces, that thou mayest ever approve thyself, oh queen of capitals,

  “Like Samson’s riddle in the sacred song,
  A springing sweet still flowing from the strong!”

Blackwood’s Magazine.

* * * * *

THE SKETCH-BOOK.

* * * * *

SCOTTISH SPORTING.

From the letters of two sportsmen; with recollections of the Ettrick Shepherd.

(For the Mirror.)

After visiting Thoms, the sculptor, “Burns’s cottage,” “Halloway Kirk,” Monument, &c., in Ayrshire, we toddled on over to Dumfries, and had a crack with poor “Rabbie Burns’s” widow, not forgetting McDiarmid the author; thence to Moffat, and up that dismal glen, the pass of Moffat, to the grey mare’s tail, a waterfall, so called from its resembling the silvery tail of a grey mare; and truly, if the simile were extended into infinitude, which from its sublimity it would admit of, we might compare its waving, silky stream swinging over the broad face of its lofty grey rock, to the tail of the pale horse of Revelation, over the chaos of time.  It was a sombre, solemn sort of a day, and the dense clouds hung curtaining down the mountain sides, like our living pall as it were—­I scarcely know how—­but we felt dismally until we took a dram and got into a perspiration, with tugging up the sinuosities of the cliff’s, to the summit of the waterfall.  Loch Skein, where we were galvanized, electrified, magnetized, and petrified, all at once, by the quackery, clackery, flappery, quatter, splatter, clatter, scatter, and dash-de-blash, and squash, of a flock of wild ducks, on its reedy, flaggy surface; O, what a scutter was there!  Our hearts, too full, leapt into our mouths, but our guns were turned into tons of lead, and ere we could heave them up to our shoulders of clay, the thousand had fled into the eternal grey mist of the mountain, like the dispersion of a confused dream.  There we stood like two sumphs, (as Hogg calls those who are ganging a bit aglee in their wits) gaping and staring at each other with a look which said, why did not you shoot?  Our dogs too stood as stiff as two pumps, with tails standing out like the handles! Apropos—­talking of Hogg, the poet, we called to see him in his half-acre island in Eltrive Lake, and truly we met with that burning hot reception which we had anticipated from Blackwood’s Magazine description of him.  We had no notes of introduction except the notes which our guns pricked upon the echoes of Ettric Forest,