It is a rather remarkable fact that almost all University papers--certainly all that have succeeded under the trying conditions of the game--have been managed and for the most part written, not by the exuberant vitality of undergraduate youth, but by the less interesting prudence of graduate maturity. It is remarkable, but not surprising. Undergraduate talent is occasionally brilliant, but is naturally transient. Generations succeed each other with such rapidity that the most capable editorial staff is vanishing into thin air just at the moment when a journal has reached the highest pitch of popularity. Moreover, amateur talent is always hard to deal with, as organizers of private theatricals know to their cost; and there is no member of society more capable of disappointing his friends at a critical moment than the amateur contributor to the press. Should the spirit move him, he will send four columns when the editor wants one; but if he is not in the vein, or happens to have something else to do, there is no promise so sacred and no threat so terrible as to persuade him to put pen to paper. If these are statements of general application, they are doubly true of undergraduates, who are always distracted by a too great diversity of occupations: Jones, whose power of intermittent satire has made him the terror of his Dons, has unaccountably taken to reading for the Schools; the poet, Smith, has gone into training for the Torpids; and Brown, whose ’_Voces Populi_ in a Ladies’ College’ were to have been something quite too excruciatingly funny, has fallen in love in the vacation and will write nothing but bad poetry. Such are the trials of the editor who drives an undergraduate team; and hence it comes about that the steady-going periodicals for which the public can pay a yearly subscription in advance, with the prospect of seeing at any rate half the value of its money, are principally controlled by graduates. No doubt they sometimes preserve a certain appearance of youthful vigour by worshipping undergraduate talent, and using the word ’Donnish’ as often and as contemptuously as possible.
[Illustration: _SAILING ON THE UPPER RIVER. Drawn by L. Speed._]
Nevertheless, there appear from time to time various ephemeral and meteoric publications, edited by junior members of the University. They waste the editor’s valuable time, no doubt; and yet he is learning a lesson which may, perhaps, be useful to him in after-life; for it is said that until he is undeceived by hard experience, every man is born with the conviction that he can do three things--drive a dog-cart, sail a boat, and edit a paper.