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testimonies in favour of the existence of that animal are fortunately clear and undoubted, so that we shall be able to proceed on much more determinate ground than we have hitherto done. The same principle of investigation, however, shall be followed out; and by showing how accurately the accounts of the older writers have been confirmed in the one case, we shall thereby furnish an additional argument in the other. This inquiry, it is intended, shall form the subject of a paper in next Number. W.

MY DEAR HOGG,

I yesterday received your very kind and entertaining letter, and had really no idea that you excelled so much in epistolary composition. It gives me great pleasure to know, that you took in good part my observations on your biography, now publishing in Constable's Magazine; and I hasten, therefore, agreeably to your earnest desire, again to touch a little on the same topic. I had an opportunity, for the first time, only the day before yesterday, of seeing the last Number of that Work, for the gentleman who was in the habit of sending me his copy, has now discontinued his subscription, on account of what he calls the pitiful spirit of its Editors, who, instead of repelling imagined sarcasm by sarcasm, talk of taking the law of their literary antagonists, and of feeing Mr Jeffrey to fight their battles; so that it was by the merest accident in the world that I picked up, at half price, a second hand copy which an English traveller had jocularly given to our friend Bob, the waiter at a certain tavern in "the Auld Town," not altogether unfrequented by you; the Bagman having found it not very portable.

I begin to suspect, my worthy James, that you have slyly sent your biographer a copy of my letter of the 20th of last month, for he is not quite so absurd in his continuation as at his first starting; and from some mysterious hints occasionally delivered by him, I should not be at all surprised, were he to turn short round upon you, and plainly tell you to your face, that you share in the general imperfection of human nature. At the same time, you will agree with me in thinking, that he has not wholly succeeded in the attempt to resist his natural inclination to the absurd, and that, during the most staid motion of his Pegasus, he resembles the rider, who,

His opening is very fine. "In an age when men eminently endowed spend their lives in the most minute researches into inanimate nature, when they traverse unknown Continents to discover a new plant or animal, and, with a zeal that success alone can satisfy, devote years to the analysis of a gas, and, with a mathematical exactness, describe the fractures of a stone, or the angles of a crystal," &c. I could not imagine (could you, James?) what was to come out of all this. To my utter surprise, it is no less than an apology for "entering at some length" into your literary history. You, it seems, are "the new animal" which the old gentleman singles out to lecture upon,—your inspiration is the gas which he is to analyse,—you, James, are the rough diamond whose angles he proposes to describe with mathematical exactness. Really, I felt, during this solemn note of preparation, much as one feels in a drawing-room, when, the stupid servant having forgotten to announce the name, the door slowly moves on its hinges, and some splendid stranger is expected to appear; but when, to the pleased surprise of the assembled company, in bounces you yourself, the worthy and most ingenious Ettrick Shepherd, rubbing your ungloved hands ("would that I were a glove on that hand!") as if you were washing them, with a good-humoured smile on your honest face enough to win every heart, and with a pair of top-boots that would do honour to St Crispin himself, and, by the associating principle of contrast, instantly recalling the shining imagery of Day and Martin's patent blacking.

Your biographer still persists in maintaining, that you are the most extraordinary man "in the annals of genius, full as they have often been of deviations from the common current of events." Terence, he thinks not worthy to tie the knee-strings of your corduroy breeches. What private picque he has against that writer I cannot