OUR PORTRAIT OF DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.--'Why,' says an esteemed foreign correspondent, 'have you, in the frontispiece of your cover, represented the venerable and benevolent author of the right veritable 'History of New-York' with such a rigid and austere expression of countenance? Surely, the painter or engraver has belied his character. I have had his counterfeit presentment for many years in my mind's eye; and whenever I look at yours, I think, with CHARLES LAMB, 'Alas! what is _my_ book of his countenance good for, which I have read so long, and thought I understood its contents, when there comes your heart-breaking errata,' to rob me of my beau ideal?' To all this we answer, in the usual Yankee manner, by asking our friend, if he does not remember, that when DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER was writing his renowned work, at the Columbian Hotel, his literary labors were often interrupted by his landlady coming into his room, and 'putting his papers to rights,' in such wise that it took him a week to find them again? Think of these untimely intrusions, while the melancholy historian was writing as follows: 'Grievous and very much to be commiserated is the task of the feeling historian who writes the history of his native land. * * * I cannot look back on the happier days of our city, which I now describe, without a sad dejection of the spirits. With a faltering hand do I withdraw the curtain of oblivion, that veils the modest merits of our venerable ancestors, and as their figures rise to my mental vision, humble myself before the mighty shades. Such are my feelings when I revisit the family mansions of the KNICKERBOCKERS, and spend a lonely hour in the chamber where hang the portraits of my forefathers, shrouded in dust, like the forms they represent. With pious reverence do I gaze on the countenances of those renowned burghers, who have preceded me in the steady march of existence; whose sober and temperate blood now meanders through my veins, flowing slower and slower in its feeble conduits, until its currents shall soon be stopped for ever! These, say I to myself, are but frail memorials of the mighty men who nourished in the days of the patriarchs; but who, alas! have long since mouldered in that tomb, toward which my footsteps are insensibly and irresistibly hastening! As I pace the darkened chamber, and lose myself in melancholy musings, the shadowy images around me almost seem to steal once more into existence--their countenances to assume the animation of life--their eyes to pursue me in every movement! Carried away by the delusions of fancy, I almost imagine myself surrounded by the shades of the departed, and holding sweet converse with the worthies of antiquity! Ah, hapless DIEDRICH! born in a degenerate age, abandoned to the buffetings of fortune--a stranger and a weary pilgrim in thy native land--blest with no weeping wife, nor family of helpless children; but doomed to wander neglected through these crowded streets, and elbowed by