Pherocious Phillips.

I regard with the utmost indignation your presumptuous request for a contribution to your illiterate publication. Nothing I do or say can fully express the contempt with which I regard this journal. Its painfully self-conscious cleverness, its old-maidenish liberalism, its anaemic tolerance, its weak-kneed criticism, its bad grammar, fill me with horror. Even the distorted reproduction of Mr. Larkin's knees, knees that have sent football fans into ecstacies, that have known the chill kiss of cathedral mosaic, cannot save its cover from vulgarity and mediocrity.

I have a close acquaintance with your paper, Sir, having read it with distaste for over four years, and having served, reluctantly, as its sub-editor for a period of several months. I feel I have done my duty by it and now wish to be left unmolested by its page 11 perpetrators.

As my fifth year of 'Varsity life draws to a close, I can find pleasure only in contemplating the excellences of another generation. I cannot become reconciled to the horde of puling neophytes that spring up around me. Gone are the gods of my youth—the Macduffs, the Reardons, the Riskes, the Rollingses, the Priestleys, and even the great Carrad flits over the scene a pale spectre of his former attenuated magnificence. A. Eaton Hurley is only a name, an archaic fragrance, a dim stained-glass luminary, forgotten by the masses, his memory worshipped in innocent heresy only by those few S.C.M.'ites who remember him. His fate was touching. Returning in a blaze of glory to the scenes of his youth, he looked for veneration, and found only venery. Scott has withdrawn, monastic and silent, from the scenes of his boisterous youth, and finding neither beauty nor wit in his contemporaries, seeks solace in the company of the great minds of antiquity. Some talk of a thesis.

And Plank, who once framed a constitution, and ruled the College with a tennis recquet, makes a dreary shut-out bid and trumps his partner's ace.

Where this decay will end, who knows?

There are new domestic gods, false idols, little argumentative fellows in fustian who blast the firmament with their rhetoric, and tread impatiently on the heels of their ancestors. What can one say of these? Why should the aged cast their pearls before the undergraduate?

Sir, kindly desist in future from penetrating into the Valhalla of the venerable, and leave me to remain