_Harvardiana_, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior year came round. His associates were Rufus King, who later attained a leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the _American Commonwealths_ series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses, some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his associates he followed the example set by _Blackwood_, and imitated by the _Knickerbocker_ and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense predominating. Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this “perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to _Harvardiana_, and on the blank leaf writes one of the imitative letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:-- “Dear Shack, a circular I send ye The which I hope will not offend ye; If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye O’ sic an ill But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye It never will! “Gin ye could get ae body’s name ’T wad add forever to his fame To help to kindle up the flame O’ sic a journal, Whose reputation, though quite lame, _Will_ be eternal. “Now if ye do your vera best In this waist glorious behest, By gettin’ names and a’ the rest I need na tell Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request O’ J. R. L.” “King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and abstraction.”