I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington
mattered very much in the world.

He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly
at a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and
detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most
acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about
us, and had determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of
instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful
magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.
He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the
earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine
so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page
of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the
printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their
own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up
space. The only literary contribution in the first number was a
column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of
some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that
noble old quotation:--


"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."


And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on
the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely
thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School