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Games often tyrannise, and it is not all schools which make enough provision for the happiness of the boy with no eye and no speed of foot; but things are improving, and the cult of natural history is now pursued under happier auspices than in Tom Brown's day.

However, we are leaving the social side of boy life, for nature is an exacting mistress, and her votaries are often solitary by taste: We must return to our ordinary, or perhaps our commonplace boy. For him we can claim to cater not unsuccessfully. A public school is essentially a compromise: "a cross," as Bishop Creighton used to say, "between a barrack and a workhouse"; but it is a barrack in which discipline is not all external, and work not all uncongenial. To learn to make friends; to learn to judge of others, if not by the highest standards, at least never by the lowest; to learn a little of the power to help others, and of the pleasure which such effort brings these are the greatest lessons which the social life of a public school enforces.

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"What did you learn at Eton? asked an Oxford tutor in despair of an unusually dense undergraduate. He has never forgotten the answer. learnt to know my place and keep it."

"I

M

XIX.

THE SCHOOL MAGAZINE.

BY J. O'REGAN.

ONE of the most universal habits of human beings is to talk about themselves and one another. This widespread instinct has been the theme of innumerable plays, novels, and sermons; but we do not here threaten our reader with any of these, we merely bid him note that one of the special forms taken by the human love of gossip is the publication of newspapers. This begins early. There are many families where the children bring out some sort of publication recording their doings and ideas, and this fascinating practice once begun acquires additional justification as it accompanies them into the wider world of school life.

Thus the public school magazine is nearer akin to the family paper than to the newspapers and magazines of the elder world. The interests of the public school are restricted; the society is closely knit together and absorbed in its own pursuits. The magazine is a record of this life; it is not written for outsiders, who are, indeed, apt to find in such papers dulness and want of variety-the same cricket and football, the same strings of names, the same unintelligible local allusions.

Take, for example, the current number of the "Wykehamist." Its Editorial begins: "In a man's last half his thoughts naturally turn to retrospect, and

in looking back at the school as it was in his first half, when he spent his days in wrestling with Notion Book and wandering miles in the vain search for a Pempe, he realises . What reader unacquainted with Winchester will make much of this?

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Let him read on. "We are called, and called justly, a conservative school. With our 500 years' past, we are not likely to neglect tradition." There is the whole thing in a nutshell. If the outsider sees little in a school paper, it is because he sees, naturally, only the surface aspect. The real truth behind it is the vivid personal life of a historic community, intense and isolated, like a regiment or a battleship. The worst way to set about understanding this life is to read the ordinary school novel, written by ladies or by headmasters of the unwiser sort; the best way is to live it yourself at the appropriate age; the next best is to study the school paper with insight.

I purpose here to give a short sketch of the evolution of a typical school magazine, to show the part it has played and plays in the life of the school, and to compare it with its contemporaries. The reader may thus be able to gather some idea of the nature and functions of a school paper, and, a more important thing, of the life it records. I choose for my example the "Marlburian," as being the paper best known to me.

The earliest paper at Marlborough, produced by members of the school, was the "Marlborough College Magazine," which appeared intermittently from 1848 on. It contained English verse, long elaborate articles on general topics, and translations from the classics-all often of considerable merit. But it was purely literary, and (in spite of its name) in no sense a representative school paper. It died out in the early sixties.

The conception of a paper which should really

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reflect the life of the school was due to six leading prefects, who, in September, 1865, brought out the first "Marlburian" on lines practically unchanged, in their main features, during forty years. So conservative are public schools! The first editors laid down the plan of the paper for the guidance of themselves and their successors. "It is intended that this publication shall neither be a mere chronicle of events, like the Eton Chronicle,' nor wholly literary, like the former 'Magazine,' but that it shall combine the two." We shall see that the paper has steadily kept to this double purpose, with necessary concessions to changing taste, through eight generations of school life. The first number accordingly contains three literary articles, two poems, and school news. The school news comprises accounts of school and house cricket matches (cricket was then played till October), and reports of school institutions, the rifle corps, the natural history society, and the debating society. The natural history society is a naturalists' field club, managed by the boys themselves under the presidency of a master. It was founded in 1864, and is, I believe, the doyen and the model of the similar societies at other public schools. The debating society discussed two motions: "That the rejection of Mr. Gladstone by the constituents of Oxford is a disgrace to the University," and "That the administration of justice by country gentlemen is unjust and prejudicial.” The first motion was carried, the

second lost.

Last comes a vigorous correspondence on school matters from would-be reformers. One letter demands more encouragement for swimming, another the substitution of representative teams in house football matches for "the present system, when the whole house plays " (at Marlborough in 1865 we are still in the age of Tom Brown). Another advocates-in verse--the mending of the school clock,

whose condition is such that, as it is made to say, it cannot :

"Bear this sad disgrace;

And so I keep for ever now

My hands before my face."

The wishes of the first two writers have long ago been carried out, but the clock and its internal complaints are still with us.

"Occasional Notes" on current events (now called "Notes on News ") were added in 1867. The idea was taken, I believe, from the "Pall Mall Gazette." Regular letters from Oxford and Cambridge correspondents, and another column recording the doings of Old Marlburians elsewhere, were soon added. The form of the paper was now fixed, and it may serve in its evolution and its contents as an example of the usual public school magazine.

All public schools have now their school paper, edited by the boys themselves, with its accounts of the various activities of the school, its work, its games, its miscellaneous societies, debating, natural history, astronomical, and what not; its record of Old Boys and their distinctions, from a marriage to a peerage, its correspondence column, which gives a good idea of the school life and interests--and last, its literary side.

I say "last" advisedly, because the great difficulty of school editors always seem to have been to keep alive the literary side of their paper.

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The editors of the "Marlburian,' for instance, soon ceased to publish heavy serious articles on such subjects as "The bad state of English workhouses," or "The education of the lower orders," subjects clearly inappropriate to a school paper.

Even so the editors of 1881 confess that "the fact seems to be that the school care for nothing but school news, and would be glad to see the literary part of the Marlburian' abolished. But this is unworthy of us."

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