No More Learning

The Growth of Journalism
was not severe. Leigh Hunt had his wife and family with him,
and visitors came every day-Charles and Mary Lamb, Hazlitt,
Shelley, Barnes (later to edit The Times), Byron, Moore, Bentham
and others. The popularity of The Examiner was not main-
tained; but, with varying fortunes, it continued in the hands of
the Hunts until 1821, and, eventually, found a new and famous
editor in Albany Fonblanque, a radical of the Benthamite school.
Thus, during a quarter of a century, his paper was repre-
sentative of the advanced group of politicians. John Forster
followed him, and, later, Henry Morley, but the management and
scheme of the paper were not modified to suit new conditions
arising out of the competition of The Spectator and The Saturday
Review, and, in the course of a few years, The Escaminer's career
ended.
In 1828, Joseph Hume and others raised money to enable Robert
Stephen Rintoul to start The Spectator as an organ of educated
radicalism. It was, indeed, to perform for radicalism a service like
that which Disraeli intended The Press to render to toryism, but, in
the forefront, whether of educated radicalism, or of a liberalism
not easily to be distinguished from independent conservatism,
The Spectator has consistently held up the banner designed
for it by its founder. Under Rintoul, it disputed the supremacy
of Fonblanque's Escaminer and led the advocacy of lord John
Russell's franchise measure of 1831 by demanding the Bill, the
whole Bill and nothing but the Bill'a demand which The
Examiner was obliged to echo, thus, in effect, acknowledging
leadership.
In 1855, The Saturday Review made its appearance without
the compendium of news which had formed a large portion of The
Spectator and The Examiner, and the former of these, after
the death of Rintoul in 1858, was remodelled in the hands of
Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton. Until Gladstone
adopted the Home Rule policy in 1885, The Spectator was his
constant supporter; but its attitude towards the liberal party
hereupon changed as to this and as to some other subjects.
According to their initial declaration, the Peelite projectors
of The Saturday Review, as has been seen, wished to free thirty
million people who were ruled despotically by The Times. Among
early writers in The Review were Sir H. S. Maine, Sir James Fitz-
james Stephen, W. Vernon Harcourt, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green,
Abraham Hayward, William Scott (an eminent Puseyite), Mrs
Lynn Linton and lord Robert Cecil. The paper was noted


## p. 199 (#229) ############################################

IV]
Weekly Papers
199
especially for the pungency of its satire, the brilliance of its
style and the nicety of its scholarship. The political events
of 1885 lost the liberal party not a few of its supporters in
journalism, and, therefore, The Speaker was launched under the
editorship of Sir T. Wemyss Reid, who had previously edited
The Leeds Mercury. It was conducted with ability and existed
a number of years without making headway in competition with
The Spectator or The Saturday Review. Upon its discontinuance,
The Nation appeared as an advocate of advanced liberalism.
Other qualified successes in this form of journalism were Charles
Mackay's London Review, in which Lawrence Oliphant, Charles
Isaac Elton and William Black, the novelist, participated in
,
1860, and The Leader, started, in 1849, with George Henry Lewes
as principal writer and a staff including Herbert Spencer, Marian
Evans, Alexander William Kinglake and Edward Michael Whitty
-the last a peculiarly gifted writer of sketches of parliamentary
celebrities.
Mention should be made of William Ernest Henley's effort to
establish, in 1889, The Scots Observer as a literary review and an
organ of imperialism, to be issued in Edinburgh, so that the Scottish
capital might rival London in the possession of a weekly review, as
it had done in quarterly reviewing and in daily journalism. Henley
summoned to his colours the most famous Scottish writers of the
day, but, in a couple of years, it was found necessary to tranfer
the paper to London, and to alter its title to The National
Observer. Even so, unfortunately, it did not find room for per-
manent growth.
A position of its own was achieved by The Economist, which for
seventeen years was under the editorship of Walter Bagehot, of whose
great critical powers, primarily, but not exclusively, devoted to
the elucidation of economical and political questions, something
has been said elsewhere.
Although The Guardian, primarily, was a religious weekly, being
founded, in 1846, by a number of churchmen, including Gladstone,
it gave much attention to political, social, and literary subjects, and
among its constant contributors were men of high rank in their
respective departments of knowledge. Until 1885, it was generally
a supporter of the liberal party, but, thereafter, its political inde-
pendence became more and more pronounced. It is impossible
here to survey the wide field of religious periodicals, valuable
though such a review would be as illustrating a gradual change
1 See, ante, chapters i and mi.


## p. 200 (#230) ############################################

200
[CH.
The Growth of Journalism
in the attitude towards religious journalism not only of the general
public, but, also, of trained theologians of various schools. A
mere catalogue of professedly religious papers might be misleading.
In specialised journalism, literature has always had a prominent
place. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a weekly
literary paper was founded entitled The Grub Street Journal,
Alexander Pope being an early contributor. Its most notable
successor, in the early part of the nineteenth century, was The
Literary Gazette, established by William Jerdan, in 1817. George
Crabbe, Mary Russell Mitford and Barry Cornwall wrote for it,
and its career extended into the fifties. In 1828, it met an
antagonist destined to win the first place—The Athenaeum. A full
history of this long-lived literary paper has been written by the son
of John Francis, who, at an early age, became associated with
its business management. The Athenaeum, in 1830, was only
struggling for existence when Charles Wentworth Dilke was placed
in authority. The help given him by John Francis was of great
value, but Dilke, in addition to being an enterprising proprietor,
was, also, a man of letters, and, by his own writing, did much
towards making secure the position of the paper. It would be
impossible here to enumerate the nineteenth-century English
writers who had more or less close connection with The Athe-
naeum and though, at various times, endeavours—such as those of
The Reader and The Academy-have been made to depose it,
these have not been attended with success.
Of journalism dealing with socicty in its many phases, much
has been seen, not only in daily newspapers but, also, in specialised
weekly publications. Of these, in the first half of the century, John
Bull, which was also a political paper, became notorious, and was
often threatened with prosecutions for libel, so much so that its
chief conductors Theodore Hook, R. H. Barham, T. Haynes Bayley
and James Smith (of Rejected Addresses) sheltered themselves
in an anonymity which prosecutors were not able to penetrate.
In more recent years, The World, founded by Edmund Yates
and Henry Labouchere, and Truth, launched by the latter after
some disagreement with Yates, became celebrated by their daring
criticisms.
A brief notice must be added of the illustrated press, which is
one of the distinctive growths of the century. Rough woodcuts,
illustrating old chapbooks and thus appealing to the masses,
attracted by representations of crimes, and other incidents
narrated to them in literary form, were followed by work much


## p. 201 (#231) ############################################

IV]
Illustrated Papers
201
more artistic, but making appeal by means essentially the same.
The adaptation of the art was possible, first, by improved mechanical
production, and, later, by the application of photography, which,
because of its ability to image an actual scene, has taken the
place of the craftsman who, working from rapid notes, assisted by
his power of imagination, contrived to represent not merely the
facts, but, also, something of their meaning. The illustration
of news pamphlets was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In 1740, The Daily Post contained a narrative
of admiral Vernon's attack on the Spaniards at Porto Bello
illustrated with a view of the fleet, the fortifications, the
harbour, the position of the Spanish fleet and the town; and
Owen's Weekly Chronicle, in 1758, portrayed the British attack
on Rochefort. These are said to be the earliest attempts in a
newspaper to illustrate a news article 1
The Observer, a Sunday paper still in existence, was the first
to adopt wood engraving after Bewick's development of the art;
but, in 1806, The Times had an illustration, slightly influenced by
Bewick's method, of Nelson's funeral car. The Observer's illus-
trations of the Cato street conspiracy in 1820, of the trial of queen
Caroline in the same year and the coronation of George IV, of his
visit to Ireland in the following year and of the famous murder of
Weare by Thurtell, Probert and Hunt in 1823, were striking
instances of ability to cater for a public on the look-out for
sensational effect. The Observer, indeed, was a worthy fore-
runner of the cheap illustrated newspapers numerous at the end
of the century.
The Illustrated London News was, however, a great leap forward.
Among the thirty-two woodcuts of the first number was a view of
the burning of Hamburg, apparently drawn from the inner Alster.
Some of the character-sketches are as good as any published
since, and far more distinctive than any photographic illustrations.
Kenny Meadows, Birkett Foster, John Leech, Sir John Gilbert,
Alfred Crowquill and their colleagues, employed by Herbert
Ingram, were associated with writers already known, and the
paper soon attained a large circulation. It was followed by The
Pictorial Times and this, again, by many others; but, chief
among its surviving competitors are The Graphic, The Queen,
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, The Field, The
Sphere. The Graphic made a step in advance when it was sup-
plemented by The Daily Graphic.
1 The Pictorial Press (1885), by Mason Jackson.


## p. 202 (#232) ############################################

202
The Growth of Journalism [ch.
We have noted several praiseworthy, but unsuccessful, attempts
to found journals, and, although this narrative deals mainly with
the nineteenth century, we may add references to two which fall
in the twentieth. One was the issue of The Pilot, partly in com-
,
petition with The Guardian. The literary quality and variety of
interest in the articles of The Pilot deserved a success which was
not attained The difficulties in the way of fighting a well-
established periodical are very great, a newcomer having to incur
expenses practically equalling those of the periodical with which
it competes, while its advertising revenue is, necessarily, very small
in comparison; and it often happens that the strain involved in
such conditions is greater than the projectors are able or willing
to bear. A similar comment may be made upon the fate of
The Tribune, intended, by its projector, to take a position at the
head of liberal journalism. The intention was admirable ; and,
from a purely literary point of view, many were the regrets
when it was learnt that the paper was a financial failure.
If the history of the newspaper press of the provinces' could
be traced in detail, it would be found, in the main, the vehicle
of opinion entirely independent of that expressed in London,
admitting the leadership of the London press as little as other
members in parliament would allow it to those sitting for London
constituencies. The provincial press has, indeed, been much
more free than the London press from the influence of political
organisers. It has been read by weavers and shoemakers no
less than by employers of labour and professional men? No
doubt, newspapers printed in London have always had a wider
circulation in the provinces than country newspapers have had
in London. One of the prosecutions which Cobbett and the
Hunts underwent was for reprinting an article written for and
published in The Stamford News; and, though London has
exercised an attraction for newspaper writers because of the
greater variety of opportunities which it offers them, many news-
papers published out of London have been as well written and
edited, as careful and, within limits, as enterprising in the
collection of news, and as skilled in the arrangement of material,
as any London journal. Several of the country newspapers
existing at the end of the nineteenth century could boast a career
longer than that of any London paper, though many bave dis-
appeared, and some, in the course of a long life, have lost
the importance which, as compared with rivals, they once possessed.
1 See Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1840—4).


## p. 203 (#233) ############################################

>
IV]
The · Provincial' Press
'
203
There were country papers in the early part of the eighteenth
century; and, though they copied from their London contem-
poraries much of their general and foreign news, they printed
information peculiar to the districts in which they circulated.
The ‘provincial' press has attracted men of ability. The Sheffield
Iris had, as editor, James Montgomery the poet; Hugh Miller,
the geologist, edited The Edinburgh Witness ; James Hannay,
The Edinburgh Courant ; William Henry Ireland was editor of
The York Herald when, in 1823, Sydney Smith sent to it for
publication the manuscript of his earliest political speech, that at
the Three Tuns in Thirsk. That Sydney Smith and his friends should
want their speeches to be published in this way, indicates the
importance of the country press at the time! John Mackay Wilson,
author of Tales of the Borders, edited The Berwick Advertiser;
William Etty, the painter, was a compositor on The Hull Packet;
De Quincey, during a part of his residence in the lake district,
walked once a week into Kendal to edit The Westmorland Gazette
and see his leading article printed; Alexander Russel, of The
Scotsman, was as influential and as independent as any writer in
the United Kingdom. These men flourished in days when, accord-
ing to some writers, the provincial press was a weak reflex of
opinions published in London-a statement which would be
entirely ridiculous if applied to the latter half of the nineteenth
century, when the extended use of the telegraph had made it
possible for the provincial newspapers to receive simultaneously
with the London press reports of important occurrences and
speeches, and to comment upon them the same night. Indeed,
there have been occasions when complaints were made in behalf
of an eminent statesman that, though he spoke in London, the
provincial newspapers could print his speech and leading articles
upon it, while his supporters in the London press could not do
more than print his speech—commenting on it the following day.
As in London, so in the country, the removal of taxes upon
paper, newspapers and advertisements gave a great impetus to
journalism, many papers being started, and not a few of the
weeklies being converted into dailies. Space will not permit a
sketch of these, valuable though it would be, if not, indeed,
essential, in any complete narrative of the industrial, social and
educational development of the country. Mention, however, must
be made of The Manchester Guardian, because, at the end of the
century, through a variety of causes, it became the chief morning
1 See G. W. E. Russell's Sydney Smith, p. 109.


## p. 204 (#234) ############################################

204
[CH. IV
The Growth of Journalism
exponent of liberal policy in the United Kingdom, and because,
during many years, there were associated with it writers of the
highest rank in special subjects. It is remarkable that these
qualities did not, in any way, lessen its experience of the keen
competition set up by less expensive journalism. Manchester had
been the scene of the first endeavour to issue a daily paper in
the provinces. This was in 1811! Another journal issued outside
London should, also, be mentioned because of its metropolitan
character. The Scotsman was founded in Edinburgh in 1817, to
promote reasoned liberal opinions. It developed into a daily paper,
and, in the hands of Alexander Russel, achieved a wide and sound
reputation. Its support was wholly given to the liberal party until
1885.
The halfpenny evening papers of the biggest centres in the
provinces and Scotland are better arranged than those of London.
Like the chief morning papers, they are connected with London
by private telegraph wires, and it would be impossible for any
London evening newspaper to obtain, within their areas, a circula-
tion of more than a few dozen copies, bought for some especial
feature.
The tendency of journalism towards the end of the century
was not of the kind anticipated by writers and thinkers of the
middle period. It depended more and more upon advertise-
ments; in many cases, the cost of procuring news and articles,
and printing and publishing them, are materially greater than
the prices charged for the newspapers; and those with very
large circulations are not always noted for careful ascertainment
of facts or for deliberation in their political judgments.
The journalist has no title to usurp the functions of prophet,
and, therefore, no attempt is made here to look into the future.
The great dependence of newspaper properties upon advertise-
ments may or may not subject them to a rude shock, or, as a
result of a reorganisation of industrial conditions, to a gradual
loss of revenue. In either case, no doubt, the contraction of their
activities in the matter of the very expensive collection of news
would be probable, since a growth in circulation cannot com-
pensate for the shrinkage of advertisements. Our task has been
to record the past of English journalism, and this, as we have
endeavoured to show, has been at least in harmony with the
general development in arts and science, and in the industrial,
social and political conditions of the country.
1 Andrews's History of British Journalism, vol. II, p. 124.


## p. 205 (#235) ############################################

CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY JOURNALISM
The man in the train has settled habits and views, definite
experience of life, its problems and difficulties. The under-
graduate changes yearly, and is in the tentative period of
youth, though the influence of his school and his restricted
atmosphere (in England, at any rate) keep him fairly constant
in type. He has much of the freedom of manhood without
its responsibilities. For him, life is a comedy, or, at most,
a tragi-comedy; he has not begun to understand. He writes, if
he writes at all, at leisure, and the product of idle hours beneath
the shade, as Horace hints, is not often destined to be remembered
beyond the year. Horace, who owed his success largely to a good
schoolmaster and the university of Athens, is, in tone and form,
the ideal poet of university life. He is half-serious, half-sportive,
with an exquisite sense of form and metre, and he has more
university imitators than a dozen good prose writers can boast.
These imitators have a zeal for form due to their reading. The
study of the ancient classics gives a sense of conciseness, and
a detestation for the mere verbiage which is frequent in ordinary
journalism. University journalism thus follows a great tradition,
but it does not start a new one.
An anarchic age like the present is inclined to underrate the
sense of tradition, which does not, perhaps, foster the most seminal
minds; but modern masters of prose and verse have mostly
been trained in it, and the maxim, 'the form, the form alone is
eloquent,' is worth remembering. In particular, the sense of
comedy which comes from playing at life has found expression
in classical parody and light verse. Here, Cambridge can show
a long line of masters whom she has trained, from Prior and
Praed to Thackeray, Calverley and J. K. Stephen. Oxford, more
in touch with the world, has been more serious and more prolific


## p. 206 (#236) ############################################

206 University Journalism [CH.
in prophets, but can claim a first-rate professor of the sportive
mood in Andrew Lang. Calverley, however, is the leading master
and his inimitable short line has had many disciples :
The wit of smooth delicious Matthew Prior,
The rhythmic grace which Hookham Frere displayed,
The summer lightning wreathing Byron's lyre,
The neat inevitable turns of Praed,
Rhymes to which Hudibras could scarce aspire,
Such metrio pranks as Gilbert oft has played,
All these good gifts and others far sublimer
Are found in thee, beloved Cambridge rhymer1
Among many excellent composers of parody in verse, A. C.
Hilton is pre-eminent. The two numbers of The Light Green,
which are mainly his work, were produced just before and after
he took his degree at Cambridge (1872), and are still sold in
reprints. They represent a solitary flowering of wit and crafts-
manship, for he died young. The Light Green ridiculed The
Dark Blue, a magazine now forgotten, which was published in
London, but was understood to represent the life and thought of
young Oxford? Hilton's supreme achievement is a parody of
Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee. The Heathen Pass-ee secretes
about his person tips for examination purposes instead of the
cards of his prototype:
On the cuff of his shirt
He had managed to get
What we hoped had been dirt,
But which proved, I regret,
To be notes on the rise of the Drama,
A question invariably set.
In the crown of his cap
Were the Furies and Fates,
And a delicate map
of the Dorian States,
And we found in his palms which were hollow,
What are frequent in palms,-that is dates.
The last two lines are perfect in point, expression and likeness
to the original. Almost equally famous are The Vulture and
the Husbandman, after Lewis Carroll, and The Octopus, after
Swinburne.
Special brilliance is certainly needed to make university
6
1 J. K. S. , Lapsus Calami, •To C. S. C. ' See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.
? Russell, G. W. E. , Collections and Recollections, chap. XXVIII.


## p. 207 (#237) ############################################

y] The Cambridge Review
207
magazines live; their humour is limited in scope, and refers to
persons who do not survive in the public memory; jests pass with
many repetitions from Oxford to Cambridge and back again, and
even to America, where an old story of Whewell is now current
concerning a new professor of encyclopaedic range. Hence, a
great number of university magazines are forgotten, and a study
of them at large does not suggest that they deserved to be more
than ephemeral. The Shotover Papers, or Echoes of Oxford
(1874—5) may serve as a typical example of parodies and com-
ments which, praised in their day, have now lost their savour. In
such magazines, the social history and atmosphere of the univer-
sity are fairly recorded for the future historian; but the Promethean
touch which lifts the local to the permanent is wanting. Great
men, however, will always attract great attention even by their
immature efforts. Thus, The Snob and The Gownsman are still
remembered because they contained the work of Thackeray; but
they were not brilliant periodicals; and comic treatments, by com-
paratively unknown persons, of subjects set for prize poems are
quite as good as Thackeray's Timbuctoo.
The credit of having been the first lasting university organ be-
longs to The Cambridge Review, which was started in 1879, and has
been published weekly in term time ever since. The first number
expresses the idea that university men are too busy to have much
time for journalism; but the purpose of the Review-to give a
representation of the life and thought of the university-has been
well maintained. It has a semi-official claim, too, on serious
readers, in publishing weekly the university sermon. Perpetual
discussions of university topics which, to the outsider, seem of
small moment is characteristic of all universities; learned and
sedentary persons are prone to controversy; and, perhaps, for this
reason, the Review has not paid so much attention to belles lettres
as some of its light-hearted predecessors. It has, however, had
its humours, as the selections in The Book of the Cambridge
Review (1898) show, and, for many years, it has excelled every
February in valentines, ingenious quotations and perversions
of quotations, addressed to men of note both in and outside
Cambridge.
In the nineties, The Granta started as a light and bright com-
mentator on Cambridge affairs, and absorbed some of the humour
which would otherwise have found a place in the Review. The
wayward genius of J. K. Stephen, already an accomplished rimer
in his Eton days, shone in both periodicals. His verse is the more


## p. 208 (#238) ############################################

208 University Journalism [CH.
astonishing inasmuch as it was casually and rapidly produced.
His best known lines (The Cambridge Review, 1891),
When the Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more! ,
have become so familiar that their author is often forgotten.
Of other Cambridge periodicals, the best are The Cambridge
University Magazine, which came out under the title The
Symposium in 1840, and contained some good work by George
Brimley, and The Tatler in Cambridge (1871—2) which was
illumined by the wit of A. W. Verrall. The Cambridge Observer
was started in 1892 by a small group including G. W. Steevens,
an Oxford man then in Cambridge, S. V. Makower and others.
Largely ignoring the ancient classics, it set out épater le bourgeois,
and was defiantly propagandist concerning foreign authors. It
contested the claim of contemporary critics, and discovered
the best of all art in the New English Art club. Such a paper
could not last, but did something, in spite of its extravagancies, to
enlarge the average mind of the university.
The Oxford Magazine, which was started in 1883, has lasted
till today, and secured a recognised position as a commentator on
university affairs. Resembling The Cambridge Review in general,
it differs in being the organ of the don. The talent for writing
English is more widely valued at Oxford than at Cambridge;
essays figure largely in examinations; and the Oxford paper is
more elaborately written than its contemporary. It is, in fact, ,
almost too well written, and loses, sometimes, in irony and para-
phrase what it would have gained by naturalness. It has that
excessive use of negative forms of expression which is character-
istic of Jane Austen and it has maintained an excellent standard
of serious verse.
The pieces in Echoes from the Oxford Magazine:
being reprints of Seven Years (1890) form a collection unrivalled
for brilliancy. R. W. Raper is supreme in his parody of Whitman.
The volume is also strong in that humour which comes from
imitating in English the style and manner of an ancient author.
* L'Envoy,' concerning the purpose of The Magazine, is a good
specimen of Oxford prose.
As The Cambridge Review was supplemented by The Granta,
The Isis was started in 1892 as a light-hearted and flippant variant
on the sobriety of The Oxford Mayazine. A prominent feature
in the paper is the series of 'Isis Idols' with illustrations.
Of other Oxford magazines of the nineteenth century, The
1 J. K. S. , Lapsus Calami, • To R. K. ' See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.


## p. 209 (#239) ############################################

v] Scots University Periodicals 209
Oxford Critic and University Magazine (1857), conducted chiefly by
undergraduates, was the first to shake off the lumbering verbosity
which came from Johnson and survived longer in the universities
than elsewhere. Its criticism was occasionally smart, but its verse
lacked distinction. The Oxford Spectator of Copleston and Nolan
(1868), in shape and size like Addison's famous periodical, is still
remembered as a deserved success. It was humorous on esoteric
subjects like Oxford philosophy, but, also, was capable of seizing
the charm of Oxford in such a passage as this :
When I look back to my own experience, I find one scene, of all Oxford,
most deeply engraved upon the mindful tablets of my soul. ' And yet not
a scene, but a fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought.
The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above Ifley, on a hot May
evening, and the gay colours of twenty boats along the shore, the poles all
stretched out from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of
'ten seconds more,' all down from the green barge to the lasher. And yet
that unrivalled moment is only typical of all the term; the various elements
of beauty and pleasur
sure are concentrated there.
The conditions of academic life in Scotland differ considerably
from those prevailing in Oxford and Cambridge, and the resultant
journalism does not make so general an appeal as the best of the
English writing of the sort. The Scots tongue, in spite of its
unqualified successes with most English readers, is not known or
liked by all, and the same may be said of Scots humour, which is
apt to be grim, and of Scots metaphysics. Apart from these
differences of language, the Scots student has not the full advan-
tage of the corporate life from which it is difficult for the Oxford
or Cambridge undergraduate to differentiate himself. The first
magazine proper of Aberdeen, The King's College Miscellany
(1846), printed mathematical and physical problems with solutions,
and translations from Greek and Latin authors. Alma Mater,
also of Aberdeen, is the oldest of the existing Scots university
periodicals, starting in 1883. It is thus six years senior to The
St Andrews College Echoes, and The Glasgow University Magazine
of 1889, and four to the Edinburgh Student. During the first
half of the century, Aberdeen was a desert so far as literature is
concerned, and it was the vivid interest of Minto that suggested
to his students the idea of Alma Mater. It has done much to
bring together the diverse elements of the university, and, from
time to time, has had excellent plates. It has also done much in
the way of academic history and reminiscence, which, previously,
had been less cultivated here than in England. St Andrews claims
a light poet and parodist of distinction in A. W. Murray, the
14
E. L. XIV.
CH, V.


## p. 210 (#240) ############################################

210
[CH.
University Journalism
author of The Scarlet Gown (1891). Andrew Lang, indeed, might
have been one of the glories of St Andrews journalism; but the
n
weekly magazine which he helped to found never reached the
dignity of print.
The University Maga is the happiest of early efforts in
Edinburgh academic journalism. It ran for twenty-four weekly
numbers in 1835 and 1837—8. Edward Forbes was mainly respon-
sible for it, and contributed some good verses and a number of
excellent caricatures and sketches. It was altogether a lively
production, and reflects the spirit of the times better than its
fellows. It was not until 1887 that it was possible to establish
a university journal with a reasonable chance of permanence, and
this can be easily understood in an intensely independent and
individualistic society with no common meeting-place and prac-
tically no sport. The students' representative council improved
matters, and The Student was started in 1887 as a private venture
with the idea that the council would, in time, assume the respon-
sibility of financing it. This happened in 1889, and, since then,
The Student has appeared weekly, and become a recognised
university institution.
The university of Edinburgh includes among its academic
writers R. L. Stevenson. The essay entitled 'A College Magazine
in Memories and Portraits describes the brief fortunes of The
Edinburgh University Magazine (the fourth of the name), which,
with three collaborators, he edited, and which perished after four
numbers.
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was the best part of it,
for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity,
and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us with
prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and
me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who
it was that edited the fourth.
As a matter of fact, the literary standard of the magazine was
high, and lord Neaves made some excellent contributions to it.
The paper by Stevenson reprinted in Memories and Portraits,
"An Old Scotch Gardener,' even after allowance for mature cor-
rection, must be regarded as an excellent character-study. But
the people of Edinburgh, academic or unacademic, could hardly be
credited with sufficient self-detachment to see special points in a
type of character long familiar in Scots life. And character-
studies are mature work, needing a mature audience, not the
faulty judgment of the young college man who worships only


## p. 211 (#241) ############################################

v]
Kottabos
2 II
success and brains. Stevenson speaks, in the former essay, of
'young gentlemen from the universities' who are encouraged, at
so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate
private individuals. It is a great merit of academic journalism
that these things are not done in the universities themselves. To
calumniate is dangerous in view of the law of libel; but the
increasing zeal for personal gossip, trivial when it is not un-
pleasant, has taken little hold on university journalism. The free
use of slang, preferably of American origin, and excessive atten-
tion to public entertainers are, further, not characteristic of such
periodicals, and, in this respect, universities may do well in
being behind the general movement of the press.
Irishmen have a way of being brilliant, and Trinity college,
Dublin, has had a galaxy of talent for its academic ventures in
journalism. The Dublin University Review, which started in
1885, was really good during its short career. Collectors now
give high prices for single copies of this Magazine of Literature,
Art and University Intelligence. The magazine had a wider scope
than English periodicals of the sort, finding room for the strongly
divergent views of Irish politicians. It was a pioneer, too, in
including poetry in the original Irish (probably the first specimens
of Irish type seen in a modern review).
The oddly named Kottabos is, however, perhaps the cream of
Irish academic wit and scholarship. It appeared three times
a year and was started by R. Y. Tyrrell in 1868, running for
thirteen years. Its fortunes and revival after an interval from
1888 to 1895 are recorded in Echoes from Kottabos(1906).
Tyrrell was a brilliant classical scholar with an extraordinary
memory and an incisive wit, and his magazine excelled in light
verse, translations and imitations (reverent and burlesque) of
poets ancient and modern, from Aeschylus to Kipling. The con-
tributors included Edward Dowden, John Todhunter, Oscar Wilde
and Standish O'Grady. Kottabos is more definitely classical than
most magazines of the sort, and some of its exercises passed into
Dublin Translations into Greek and Latin Verse, a form of
journalism, perhaps, too learned to gain general recognition. Still,
it may be remembered that, without distinction in Latin verse
translation, Addison might never have had the chance to establish
the periodical essay, or Prior the school of light verse which is
the chief distinction of university writing.
1 KOTTaßos, a game in vogue at Athens depending on the skilful throwing of wine
from a cup.
14-2


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CHAPTER VI
CARICATURE AND THE LITERATURE OF SPORT
PUNCH
The literature to be described in this chapter owes so much,
in origin and in development, to pictorial art, that the subject
demands a brief preliminary account of the growth of engraving,
a
and especially of caricature, in England. Caricature, in the sense
of pictorial comment on contemporary political or social conditions,
was not unknown in the reign of James II. William III brought
with him from Holland Dutch artists, among them de Hooghe,
who produced work of this nature; and their presence spurred on
native artists. In the reign of Anne, caricature was frequent.
A print of 1710 shows Sacheverell taking counsel of the devil
and a Roman catholic priest; and Sacheverell often appeared
in political plates. The famous pamphlet ascribed by Swift to
Arbuthnot, Law is a Bottomless Pit or The History of John
Bull (1712), was a fertile source of figures for draughtsmen.
If this pamphlet did not originate the impersonation of England
as 'John Bull,' it made it popular; while the appearance of
Louis XIV as 'Lewis Baboon,' of Holland as 'Nick Frog,' of
Charles of Spain as “The Lord Strutt,' of the English parliament
as 'Mrs Bull,' and so forth, provided political draughtsmen
with ideas of the kind that they needed. Now, as later, tories
freely used this weapon against whigs. The South Sea Bubble,
in the year 1720, gave a strong impetus to English caricature.
Pine, Bickham and Picart were among the many artists who
produced plates on the subject; but more important than any
was the work of Hogarth. After the time of the South Sea
Bubble, caricatures became more and more popular; to some
extent, they took the place of the political pamphlets which had
been common in the previous century? . Gravelot, in 1727, made
an engraving which appears to have been the first attack of this
kind on the prevalent corruption at parliamentary elections;
1 See, ante, vol. VII, chap. xvi.


## p. 213 (#243) ############################################

CH. VI]
Hogarth
213
and he was one of many caricaturists who found a fruitful
subject in Walpole and his whig government. The caricatures
of the day were not all political. Social conditions were freely
criticised; many of the plates being grossly improper and many
very ill-drawn. The designing of these pictorial jests or attacks
became something like fashionable : amateurs indulged in it, such
as the countess of Burlington and George Townshend. Pope was
a favourite subject, and lord Bute was frequently attacked for his
patronage of the Scots; while one of the best known prints is
the caricature of Handel as a pig playing the organ, by Goupy,
drawing-master to George III.
Setting aside his artistic greatness, the service which Hogarth
rendered to caricature was twofold. On the one hand, he showed
that both political and social subjects could be treated forcibly
without deliberate grossness. To modern taste, a good deal of
Hogarth appears coarse: comparison of his work at its coarsest with
plates by the common run of unknown or little known artists of
the early part of the eighteenth century will show him by contrast
refined. The social satirist must needs handle foul matter; but
Hogarth never, like some of his contemporaries, indulges in gross-
ness for its own sake, nor appears to enjoy it. Henry Fielding's
tribute to Hogarth's work in the introduction to Joseph Andrews
raised the estimation of caricature to a higher position than it had
yet occupied ; and if, later in their treatment, for instance, of
lady Hamilton and Nelson), English caricaturists forgot what they
had learned from Hogarth, his influence was never wholly lost.
Pictorial art, following the example of literature from Defoe,
through The Spectator, to Fielding, turned with interest to the
common life around itself. Hogarth found a various and strong-
featured world to his hand. The life of fashionable people,
Heidegger's masquerades, the Italian opera, Rich and his panto-
mimes, plays representing 'low life'-in the two famous Pro-
gresses and in many other plates these subjects are recorded
for us without the grotesque exaggeration which was frequent
among caricaturists of his day. In Gin Lane, Beer Street, The
Enraged Musician and other plates we have the London life
that was under the artist's eyes preserved for our own; and in
such plates as England, France and Calais Gate may be found
that feeling of 'John Bull’ towards the Frenchman which was
apparent in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy, and
was to become a prominent element of the literature and life of
England till long after the fall of Napoleon. To Hogarth's choice


## p. 214 (#244) ############################################

214
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
of subject and to his treatment of what subjects he chose, English
literature owed a considerable debt.
The second benefit which Hogarth conferred upon pictorial
illustration and caricature lay on the commercial side of the
artist's work. With George Vertue and others, he was instru-
mental in obtaining from parliament an act to vest in the designer
the exclusive copyright in his own works. This bill received the
royal assent in 1735, just before the publication of The Rake's
Progress, and was destined to have important effects upon the
commerce of engraving a few years later. Meanwhile, among
those who were to benefit immediately were the caricaturists of the
middle period of the eighteenth century: John Collett, S. H. Grimm,
Bickham, Bamfylde, captain Minshull and captain Topham (two
half-amateur artists whose designs were usually engraved by
others), besides certain French artists working in London. About
this time, too, the political magazine found its way to favour, and
a number of artists supplied these magazines with caricatures,
which were usually signed with pseudonyms. Eminent names
in the latter half of the eighteenth century were Sayer and
Darley. Sayer was a poor draughtsman, but an efficient carica-
turist. In the pay of Pitt, he attacked the governments of
Rockingham, of Shelburne and of the coalition ; of Sheridan, he
frequently made caricatures, dwelling especially on his relations
with the prince regent; and the caricature, A Nightmare, which
appeared in The Anti-Jacobin in 1799, is one of the most im-
pressive ever drawn. Founded on a picture by Fuseli, it shows
Fox hag-ridden and otherwise tortured in sleep by phantoms of
the French revolution. Sayer was also, to some degree, a poet:
he wrote satires, and also the poem on the death of Pitt, ‘Elijah's
Mantle,' which was ascribed to Canning. George Darley is chiefly
known as the pictorial satirist of maccaronis, as the travelled and
effeminate fops of the period were called. Between 1780 and
1785, the supremacy of Sayer was challenged and overthrown by
a Scottish caricaturist, James Gillray. Gillray's first caricature
was an engraving of lord North, published anonymously in 1769.
Till 1780, he was chiefly engaged on social subjects ; after 1782,
his work was almost exclusively political. He published in that
year a series of designs concerning Rodney's victory over De
Grasse off Dominica. By 1811, when he became imbecile, he
,
had executed some 1500 caricatures, and won an unique position
in his art. The lesson that Hogarth had taught, Gillray mainly
neglected. His work is savage and brutal; he can be as bitter as


## p. 215 (#245) ############################################

vi]
John Boydell
215
Swift and as crossgrained and coarse as Smollett. But his vigour
was great and his invention fertile; and he demands mention in this
chapter because he passed on the lamp to his young friend Thomas
Rowlandson. But, before considering Rowlandson and another of
his friends, Bunbury, it is necessary to go back and pick up another
thread of the story.
Hogarth and his fellows had won for the artist copyright in
his own engravings; but the market remained for some years
restricted to England. Duties on prints entering France were
so high as to close the French market to English artists ; mean-
while, French prints found their way in large quantities to
London. The removal of this disability of English engravers
was chiefly due to the artist and print-seller, John Boydell.
Boydell began his successful career by engraving small landscapes,
which, because print-shops were few, he exhibited in the windows
of toy-shops. From small landscapes he went on to large views
of London, Oxford and Cambridge and other places; and, in
1751, having done well with a volume of views in England and
Wales, he set up as a print-seller. Ardent in his encouragement
of British talent, and aided in the early years of the reign of
George III by a bounty allowed to English prints for sale in
France, Boydell succeeded in turning the print-trade with that
country from an import trade to an export trade with an annual
revenue of £200,000. The impulse given to English engraving was,
naturally, very strong; and it lasted after the outbreak of the
French revolution had destroyed the trade with France. Boydell's
illustrated edition of Shakespeare was published in 1802; but he
had begun to collect materials for it so early as 1786. His object
was to encourage English painting, as he had encouraged English
engraving; and he employed the most eminent artists of his day.
With Boydell, the print-seller first developed into the patron
and employer, and the development was to have an important, if
indirect, influence upon the relations of pictorial art to literature.
The large number of capable artists whom the new conditions
had brought into being gave pictorial art the power, as it were, of
dictating to literature. These artists were accustomed (amid the
barrenness and mock-antique solemnity of the academic art of the
day) to deal freely and naturally with the common scenes, whether
topographical or human, of the world about them. They worked
for the people, not for connoisseurs; and, in time, they came to
find the need of a literature that should form a vehicle for their
productions. This movement was greatly advanced by Rudolph


## p. 216 (#246) ############################################

216 Caricature and Sport [CH.
Ackermann, a German by origin, who, in 1795, opened a print-
shop in the Strand. Among Ackermann's achievements was the
establishment in England of lithography as a fine art. He used
the process largely in his monthly publication, The Repository
of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, which ran from
1809 to 1828. More important to the present subject is the
fact that he turned to caricaturists for the provision of illus-
trated books; and among the earliest that he published was
Bunbury's work, Academy for Grown Horsemen . . . . by Geoffry
Gambado, Esq. William Henry Bunbury, sportsman, caricaturist
and writer, was already known for his admirable chalk-drawings
of scenes in real life, most of which were engraved for him by
other artists—Ryland, Gillray, Rowlandson, Watson, Bartolozzi,
Bretherton the print-seller and Dickinson. Never treating politi-
cal matters, he had done good work in social subjects, such as
the seven plates entitled The propagation of a lie, burlesque
designs for Tristram Shandy, the plate named A Chop House,
which contains one of the many caricature portraits of Samuel
Johnson, and A Long Minuet (as danced at Bath). Boydell
had employed him to make designs for Shakespeare's comedies.
To Ackermann, he brought a series of comic plates of horse-
manship (a subject that he well understood), accompanied by
a descriptive letterpress that is still of a fresh and ingenious
humour. Geoffry Gambado, the supposed author, is described as
‘Master of the Horse, Riding Master, and Grand Equerry to the
Doge of Venice,' and he is presented as having been drowned at
sea while on his way to teach horsemanship to the English. The
frontispiece shows him as exceedingly corpulent. The advice
given by this worthy Venetian, and the letters supposed to be
addressed to him by horsemen anxious for his advice, make up a
small and constantly entertaining volume, which is important
from several points of view. It is an early example of the litera-
ture of sport, in which the succeeding half century was to be rich;
it was read and enjoyed by Apperley, Surtees, Smedley and other
authors of novels of sport; and it was the first of the illustrated
humorous books for which Ackermann's publishing house became
famous. Bunbury was far more draughtsman than writer; and,
though both letterpress and illustrations were his work, this book
must be regarded as an early instance of pictorial art calling
literature into being. A few years later, caricature was to
prove, through Ackermann again, more markedly the patron of
literature in the domain of comedy. Among the artists working


## p. 217 (#247) ############################################

vi]
Rowlandson and Combe
217
in London was a young man, Thomas Rowlandson, who, after
studying, to the great advantage of his art, in Paris, had given up
portrait-painting for caricature, or genre-painting, in oils, and for
brilliant comic sketches, which he tossed off in great quantity.
Dissipated and improvident, he was incapable of managing his
own affairs, and was all the better for attaching himself to a
taskmaster of Ackermann's good sense and acumen. His carica-
ture was occasionally brutal; but he lived in a 'hard-hitting,
hard-riding, hard-drinking age,' and he portrayed it faithfully.
His friend, John Bannister, the actor, is said to have suggested to
him a series of plates representing a country curate travelling
about England. Travels were popular at the time. Much of Acker-
mann's success was won from his series of picturesque tours, to
which further reference will be made later; and, whether the idea
were Bannister's, or Rowlandson's, or another's, there can be little
doubt that it was inspired by the very popular books of travel in
England written and illustrated between 1782 and 1809 by William
Gilpin. On approving of the idea, Ackermann entrusted the writing
of the letterpress to William Combe.
William Combe had begun bis literary career with The Dia-
boliad (1776), a savage satire in verse on a nobleman (said to
have been Simon, lord Irnham), whose, cast-off mistress he had
married on a promise of money, that was not paid. Its successors,
The Diabo-lady and The Anti-Diabo-lady, are equally spirited.
Combe, as a satirist, is still readable for the vigour and rapidity of
his verse; but he had not the temperament nor the talent to
achieve greatness. In life and letters alike he was unprincipled ;
and among his deceptions are the spurious Letters of the late
Lord Lyttelton, and the spurious Letters of Sterne to Eliza, in
writing which, no doubt, he drew upon the acquaintance with
Sterne which he had formed in Italy. As a hack-writer for
a publisher he was valuable, and never more so than when he
wrote for Ackermann the verses that were to accompany
Rowlandson's drawings of the adventures of Dr Syntax, as the
travelling clergyman was named. The work was done, by both
artist and author, under extraordinary conditions. A certain
quantity had to be supplied monthly for publication in Ackermann's
Poetical Magazine. One drawing at a time only was sent to
Combe, then a man of sixty and confined for debt in the King's
Bench prison. Combe, thereupon, wrote, or dictated, the requisite
number of lines (the printer, as the story goes, waiting in Combe's
presence for his 'copy' lest the dilatory author should postpone


## p. 218 (#248) ############################################

218
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
his task). In this disjointed fashion, these two very unsystematic
workers produced a poem of nearly ten thousand lines, illustrated
by thirty plates and a pictorial frontispiece. It would be juster
to say that they produced thirty plates and a pictorial frontis-
piece illustrated by nearly ten thousand lines. The ideas were
Rowlandson’s ; Combe, the writer, played the part usually played
by the illustrator ; and the combination provides a capital early
instance of an imaginative work written to fit pictures already
drawn. The practice continued. This was the genesis of The
Pickwick Papers; and the modern writer of serial stories for
illustrated magazines suffers (if he may be said to suffer) in good
company.
Under the title The Tour of Dr Syntax in search of the
Picturesque, the joint work of Rowlandson and Combe was
published in The Poetical Magazine in 1809 and onwards, and
first appeared as a separate volume in 1812. Its popularity was
immediate and very great. The figure of the lean curate and
schoolmaster in his scratch wig and his rusty black suit, with his
long nose and chin, caught the public fancy; and, doubtless, the
device of representing him as a man of learning and of some
dignity added to the fun of the ridiculous mishaps into which he
fell. In the character of Syntax, Combe attempted to combine Don
Quixote with parson Adams; and, though the attempt revealed
his shortcomings in imagination and humour, he so far succeeded
that Syntax remains good company to this day. Feeling the pinch
of poverty, the reverend doctor announces to his busy and
shrewish wife that, while his pupils are at home for the summer
holidays, he intends to make a tour.
“I'll make a TOUR—and then I'll WRITE IT.