company of Greatheart.

TO A YOUNG JOURNALIST

Dear Smith,--

You inform me that you desire to be a journalist, and you are kind enough
to ask my advice. Well, be a journalist, by all means, in any honest and
honourable branch of the profession. But do not be an eavesdropper and a
spy. You may fly into a passion when you receive this very plainly
worded advice. I hope you will; but, for several reasons, which I now go
on to state, I fear that you won't. I fear that, either by natural gift
or by acquired habit, you already possess the imperturbable temper which
will be so useful to you if you do join the army of spies and
eavesdroppers. If I am right, you have made up your mind to refuse to
take offence, as long as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself
forward in the band of journalistic reptiles. You will be revenged on
me, in that case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty
bludgeon, and steal on me out of a sewer. If you do, permit me to assure
you that I don't care. But if you are already in a rage, if you are
about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me personally,
or at least to answer me furiously, then there is every hope for you and
for your future. I therefore venture to state my reasons for supposing
that you are inclined to begin a course which your father, if he were
alive, would deplore, as all honourable men in their hearts must deplore
it. When you were at the University (let me congratulate you on your
degree) you edited, or helped to edit, _The Bull-dog_. It was not a very
brilliant nor a very witty, but it was an extremely "racy" periodical. It
spoke of all men and dons by their nicknames. It was full of second-hand
slang. It contained many personal anecdotes, to the detriment of many
people. It printed garbled and spiteful versions of private
conversations on private affairs. It did not even spare to make comments
on ladies, and on the details of domestic life in the town and in the
University. The copies which you sent me I glanced at with extreme
disgust.

In my time, more than a score of years ago, a similar periodical, but a
much more clever periodical, was put forth by members of the University.
It contained a novel which, even now, would be worth several ill-gotten
guineas to the makers of the _chronique scandaleuse_. But nobody bought
it, and it died an early death. Times have altered, I am a fogey; but
the ideas of honour a