You are not satisfied with calling me a liar, an epithet which the world will attach to me, if I fail to establish the justice of my assertions, and which it will bestow upon you, sir, as soon as it believes me to have made out my point. You add, "Z is a coward." This assertion is at the best premature. Perhaps you may hereafter find reason to retract your charge. But you will permit me to observe, that you invited Z to disclose his name, in terms which augured no very chivalrous intentions on your part. It is all one. That is a matter of very little importance either to Z or to the public.
Junius, a much greater man than Z, was once attacked with epithets similar to yours, by a more respectable man than you—Sir William Draper. He replied in these terms, which I transcribe for your use. "When you tell me I have submitted to be called a liar and a coward, I must ask you in my turn, whether you seriously think it any way incumbent on me to take notice of the silly invectives of every simpleton who writes in a newspaper; and what opinion you would have formed of my discretion, if I had suffered myself to be the dupe of so shallow an artifice?" Z.
SAGACITY OF A SHEPHERD'S DOG.
MR EDITOR,
It has often occurred to me, that a well-supported Magazine, such as yours, is very like a general conversation of well-informed people in a literary society, who have met together to give their opinions freely, for one another's mutual entertainment, without any particular subject being fixed upon for the theme of the evening.
In such a party, it usually happens that one makes a powerful attack upon some new publication or celebrated author of the day; and an animated, and sometimes a violent dispute arises, upon the justice of his criticism. Another describes some new discovery in science, communicates some doubt in metaphysics, or some curious fact in natural history; while a third delights the company by telling a ludicrous story of some general acquaintance. Each of the audience commonly feels an inclination to bring forward something that burdens his memory, some observation that he thinks interesting, or an anecdote suggested by what he has heard; while several, diffident of doing justice to their own conceptions, are content to be pleased with the efforts of others, rather than risk the success of their own.
The amusing article in your Number for October, "On the Depravity of Animals," were I to judge from myself, has likely placed several of your readers in this predicament; and probably it might have been just as well, had all remained in the way of thinking last described. However, I have broke through the restraint of such feelings, in order to add my mite to your monthly Miscellany.
Among the many similar occurrences that I have seen and heard of, and which the interesting anecdotes of the robber's horse and the sheep-stealer's dog have brought to my recollection, there is one that puts the sagacity of the shepherd's dog in a more favourable light than that of the evil-disposed Yarrow there narrated, and which, though verging now upon traditionary story, is not as yet too old to be authenticated, and which puts to shame the lukewarm shepherds of modern days, who rather incline to read a newspaper than their Bibles, even on Sunday; and their dull dogs, which get fat lying basking in the sun at the feet of their masters, because they must not run at the white-faced sheep, forsooth, lest they do the lazy animals a mischief.
It is well known to all those conversant with the hill country that crowns the southern district of Scotland, that the sect now called Cameronians are thinly scattered among the population of the most upland glens, where many of them can to this day trace their descent from those who so heroically suffered and bled during the tyrannical reign of James Duke of York, as they still call him. Their pastors have their fixed stations, generally on the verge of the low country, but are in the habit of taking periodical journeys, in the summer season, among their scanty flocks, who have now become, to use the figurative language of the prophet, like the gleanings of the latter vintage, a cluster upon the upmost bough; a berry here and there upon the outermost branches. The preachers undertake these pilgrimages to look after the few
