Schools of journalism and professorships of Press lore are “all my eye and Betty Martin.” The journalist, like the poet, is born, not made. A University education can do him no harm. A large proportion of the men of the seventies and eighties had had a distinguished University career. Nor does the absence of a college education prejudice the aspiring neophyte. Those men, indeed, who have made themselves a name in journalism—such men, for instance, as George Sala and Archibald Forbes—started without any of the equipment supplied by an Alma Mater. Any training worth mentioning must be picked up on the Press itself. And the main qualification is a natural aptitude. Thus, the journalist—self-taught man, or public-school man, or University man—just drifts into it. Personally I have to admit that it was in my own case entirely a matter of drifting. Unconsciously and gently impelled toward it by the motions of a certain desire for facile and frequent expression in print, one becomes eventually the subject of an invincible attraction. Those who were responsible for the ordering of my early life took a large view of their responsibilities. The same persons who had provided me with a rattle and a cradle, in later years selected for me a profession. And although I have never ceased to be a member of the learned profession chosen for me, in the same way that I abandoned the rattle and the perambulator, it has never afforded me either the amusement or the support supplied by the toys or the equipages of childhood. I am indebted to it, however, for some cherished friendships, and for introductions to some valuable “openings” into that teeming journalistic arena with which I was to become identified. Those set in authority over me believed that I was “cut out” for a barrister. But when I, my friends, was called to the Bar, I’d an appetite—well, for anything but law. The law never appealed to me. Literature always did. Before I went into chambers—and for some time after that—the only interest the Temple possessed for me was that Goldsmith lay buried there, and that there Warrington and Pendennis railed against the publishers, and wrote for the _Pall Mall Gazette_, thus antedating by many years the actual appearance of that journal. While reading for the Bar and keeping my terms, I had few acquaintances in London beyond those I met at the dinners in Hall, and Mr. MacDermott, with whom I “read.” The town seemed deadly lonely at first. It takes some time before the new-comer realizes that he is part of the crowd that jostles him, before the feeling of isolation gives way to that of fellowship.