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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 1

A Colonial Governor as a Journalist

page 46

A Colonial Governor as a Journalist.

At a recent Johnsonian Club dinner in Brisbane, Sir Anthony Musgrave, the Governor of Queensland, said: I venture to believe with many of you I have some tastes and sympathies in common. I am not exactly a literary man with a wooden leg, like Mr Boffin's friend who read to him Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I am a sort of lame literary man, limping along after his fashion in the land of letters; though, as Charles Lamb said his works must be sought for at the India house, so I say mine must be found at the Colonial Office in the shape of some thousands of despatches, many of which have not received half the attention that they deserve. But besides this, I once had the temerity to publish a book which, I am sorry to say, did not sell very well. At times I indulged in occasional contributions to reviews which have not always produced the effect that they ought. But what I am proudest of is that I really was editor of a newspaper for three months, and I think I acquired more knowledge of the world in those three months than in any other three months ever since. In that time I managed successfully to quarrel with a bishop, to fall under the displeasure of the elders of the Church, to strain my relations with some of my best friends, and to lose a good many subscribers, to say nothing of the fact of being obliged sometimes, at the thirteenth hour, to sit down and write an article in place of that which the other fellow did not send in time. In fact, I managed to get the whole thing into a pretty muddle, and the situation was becoming so very interesting that I really felt quite sorry that increase of other duties about that time obliged me to terminate my connection with the paper—not, however, jesting apart, before we had in many respects, sown some good seed, which afterwards bore good fruit.