a tale after all of tears and blood--and the tale-teller too often cares little whether he is talking about the good or the bad, vices or virtues,―nay, he too often takes part with the bad against the good, and seems no more to hate sin because it triumphs. But Sir Walter is too good, too wise a man to do so--and as the people of Scotland have, for many hundred years been, on the whole, an excellent people, you will far oftener be glad than sorry in reading their history as it is told here--and when you have finished all the volumes and come to Finis, you will think--and there will be no harm in thinking-that you would rather be-what you are a little Scottish girl, than even an English one—although, now that the two kingdoms have so long been united into one, Scottish and English girls are all sisters; and so on, indeed, up to the very oldest old

women.

Wil.

Never, never ought the time to come when one's own country is less beloved than any other land. Neither you, Mary, nor Hugh, must ever be citizens of the world. liam Tell, you have heard, was a glorious Swiss peasant, who made all his countrymen free, and procured for them liberty to live as they liked, without a great king, who cared little about them, having it in his power to plague and humble them in their beautiful little cottages up among the mountains. Love always and honour his memorybut love and honour still more the memory of Sir William Wallace, because he did the same and more for Scotland. I declare-John with the lunch-tray!

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1828.)

FYTTE FIRST.

WE delight, as all the world has long well known, in every kind of fishing, from the whale to the minnow; but we also delight, as all the world now well knows, in every kind of fowling, from the roc to the wren. Not that we ever killed either a roc or a wren; but what comes to the same thing, we have, on two occasions, by design brought down an eagle, and, on one occasion, accidentally levelled a tom-tit. In short, we are considerable shakes of a shot; and, should any one of our readers doubt the fact, his scepticism will probably be removed by a perusal of the following article.

There is a fine and beautiful alliance between all pastimes pursued on flood and field and fell. The principles in human nature on which they are pursued, are in all the same; but those principles are subject to infinite modifications and varieties, according to the difference of individual and national character. All such pastimes, whether followed merely as pastimes, or as professions, or as the immediate means of sustaining life, require sense, sagacity, and knowledge of nature and nature's laws; nor less, patience, perseverence, courage even, and bodily strength or activity, while the spirit which animates and supports them is a spirit of anxiety, doubt, fear, hope, joy, exultation, and triumph, in the heart of the young a fierce passion,-in the heart of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed

down, without, however, being much dulled or deadened, by various experience of all the mysteries of the calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all impetuous impulses in the frame of all mortal men beyond perhaps threescore, when the blackest head will be becoming gray, the most nervous knee less firmly knit, the most steely-springed instep less elastic, the keenest eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most boiling heart less like a cauldron or a crater-yea, the whole man subject to some dimness or decay, and, consequently, the whole duty of man like the new edition of a book, from which many passages that formed the chief glory of the editio princeps have been expunged, and the whole character of the style corrected. indeed, without being improved,-just like the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, which were written by Akenside when he was about twenty-one, and altered by him at forty-to the exclusion or destruction of many most splendida vitia, by which process, the poem, in our humble opinion, was shorn of its brightest beams, and suffered disastrous twilight and severe eclipse-perplexing critics.

Now, seeing that these pastimes are in number almost infinite, and infinite the varieties of human character, pray what is there at all surprising in your being madly fond of shooting and your brother Tom just as foolish about fishing-and cousin Jack perfectly insane on fox-huntingwhile the old gentleman your father, in spite of wind and weather, perennial gout and annual apoplexy, goes a-coursing of the white-hipped hare on the bleak Yorkshire wolds and uncle Ben, as if just escaped from Bedlam or St. Luke's, with Dr. Haslam at his heels, or with a few hundred yards' start of Dr. Warburton, is seen galloping, in a Welsh wig and strange apparel, in the rear of a pack of Lilliputian beagles, all barking as if they were as mad as their master, supposed to be in chase of an invisible animal that keeps eternally doubling in field and forest"still hoped for, never seen," and well christened by the name of Escape?

Phrenology sets the question for ever at rest. All people have thirty-three faculties. Now there are but twenty-four letters in the alphabet-yet how many languages-some six thousand we believe, each of which is susceptible of

many dialects! No wonder then that you might as well try to count all the sands on the sea-shore as all the species of sportsmen.

There is, therefore, nothing to prevent any man with a large and sound developement from excelling, at once, in rat-catching and deer-stalking-from being in short a universal genius in sports and pastimes. Heaven has made us such a man.

Yet there seems to be a natural course or progress in pastimes. We do not speak now of marbles-or knuckling down at taw-or trundling a hoop-or pall-lall-or pitch and toss-or any other of the games of the school playground. We restrict ourselves to what, somewhat inaccurately perhaps, are called field-sports. Thus angling seems the earliest of them all in the order of nature. There the new-breeched urchin stands on the low bridge of the little bit burnie! and with crooked pin, baited with one unwrithing ring of a dead worm, and attached to a yarn thread, for he has not yet got into hair, and is years off gut, his rod of the mere willow or hazel wand, there will he stand during all his play-hours, as forgetful of his primer as if the weary art of printing had never been invented, day after day, week after week, month after month, in mute, deep, earnest, passionate, heart-mind-and-soulengrossing hope of some time or other catching a minnow or a beardie! A tug-a tug! with face ten times flushed and pale by turns ere you could count ten, he at last has strength, in the agitation of his fear and joy, to pull away at the monster-and there he lies in his beauty among the gowans on the greensward, for he has whapped him right over his head and far away, a fish a quarter of an ounce in weight, and, at the very least, two inches long! Off he flies, on wings of wind, to his father, mother, and sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and all the neighbourhood, holding the fish aloft in both hands, still fearful of its escape, and, like a genuine child of corruption, his eyes brighten at the first blush of cold blood on his small fishy-fumy fingers. He carries about with him, up stairs and down stairs, his prey upon a plate; he will not wash his hands before dinner, for he exults in the silver scales adhering to the thumb-nail that scooped the pin out of the baggy's

maw-and at night, "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined," he is overheard murmuring in his sleep, a thief, a robber, and a murderer, in his yet infant dreams!

From that hour angling is no more a delightful daydream, haunted by the dim hopes of imaginary minnows, but a reality-an art-a science of which the flaxenheaded school-boy feels himself to be master-a mystery in which he has been initiated; and off he goes now, all alone, in the power of successful passion, to the distant brook-brook a mile off-with fields, and hedges, and single trees, and little groves, and a huge forest of six acres, between and the house in which he is boarded or was born! There flows on the slender music of the shadowy shallows-there pours the deeper din of the birchtree'd waterfall. The scared water-pyet flits away from stone to stone, and dipping, disappears among the airy bubbles, to him a new sight of joy and wonder. And oh! how sweet the scent of the broom or furze, yellowing along the braes, where leap the lambs, less happy than he, on the knolls of sunshine! His grandfather has given him a half-crown rod in two pieces-yes, his line is of hair twisted-platted by his own soon-instructed little fingers. By heavens, he is fishing with the fly! and the Fates, who, grim and grisly as they are painted to be by full-grown, ungrateful, lying poets, smile like angels upon the paidler in the brook, winnowing the air with their wings into western breezes, while at the very first throw the yellow trout forsakes his fastness beneath the bog-wood, and with a lazy wallop, and then a sudden plunge, and then a race like lightning, changes at once the child into the boy, and shoots through his thrilling and aching heart the ecstasy of a new life expanding in that glorious pastime, even as a rainbow on a sudden brightens up the sky.. Fortuna favet fortibus-and with one long pull and strong pull, and pull all together, Johnny lands a twelve-incher on the soft, smooth, silvery sand of the only bay in all the burn where such an exploit was possible, and dashing upon him like an Osprey, soars up with him in his talons to the bank, breaking his line as he hurries off to a spot of safety twenty yards from the pool, and then flinging him down on a heath-surrounded plat of sheep-nibbled verdure, lets