THE

NEW RUGBEIAN.

No. I.

OCTOBER, 1858.

"ALL things must have an end," and it is an equally acknowledged truth that all things must have a beginning; in accordance with which philosophical sentiment we have resolved to sit down, after the manner of the ancients, and write a Preface. In the present day people do not sit still and receive stereotyped opinions; it is the fashion to have an organ, and through that organ to give one's ideas, good or bad, true or false, wise or foolish, to the public. Politicians have organs; publicans have organs; parsons have organs; all expressing "the bass notes or the treble notes, the harmonious warble or the shrill alarm," the uncomfortable growl or the furious howl, the full diapason of the bellows of John Bull.

Youth is imitative; let us have an organ too. Who should have an organ, if not the best school, &c. &c.? Ignorant we are of the world, and, alas! too ignorant of books: weak will be our sentiments and matter; weaker the style, the water we shall mix with them; yet weak and foolish and ignorant as our writing may be, weakness, good friends, and folly and ignorance is now-a-days no reason against writing.

"But echoes, empty echoes; to what end Call back void fictions of an untaught soul,

B

Waste thoughts that profit not, nor bear with growth?

Have I not seen the shoreward-drifting foam,
The fairy daughter of the deep-laid sea,

Spring from a wrinkle of her father's brow,

And bound in strength to life? then cast adrift,
Dissevered from the original parent force

Lie weak and perishing? So our thoughts, that seemed,
Laid in their heaps, and caverns, to be somewhat,
When stammered forth in words, are all unworth
But bubbles of a power that is not in them.
Aye, bubbles, clustering fast, and in their growth
Taking new beauties of prismatic light,
And form, and colour; and when fully grown
To shapes far other than they wore at first,
Collapsing, fading, dying: sometimes quick
In their way downward, like the stars that fade,
And by their fall make darkness yet more dark:
And sometimes, tainted by the muddy world,

All semblance lost to that pure power that bore them,
Festering in lonely corners of the mind

Mere foam-flakes of corruption."

Such, as every one will find to their cost, more or less, is the end of thoughts in general, thoughts kept selfishly at home, through modesty, or ignorance or pride. But we will not look so gloomily at our NEW RUGBEIAN, or our prospects of success in our undertaking; no, we will go into our halls and look round at our fellows-fellows whom we like and honour, as all true Rugbeians should; fellows of every shade of thought and feeling; fellows big and little, slow or coxsy, wise or foolish; but all (we speak for our own house) good honest English fellows, all, to use a somewhat hackneyed quotation, "a band of brothers," bound together, more or less, all of them, by good house feeling; fellows who in cricket, or football, or lessons, or

life in general, will give one another a helping hand, aye, and a head, and a heart, if they need it.

The undertaking we have thus, perhaps somewhat hastily, begun, though it may take the majority of the school by surprise, and may be attributed by some to mistaken zeal, and by others to less worthy motives,—has been the result of a deep conviction, that the present state of the school requires something of the nature of our periodical, and that now or never is the time to begin.

We have not, we fear, quite the energetic character of Rugbeians of old, either for good or for evil: bullying has gone out, and we fear we shall not equal the power of the Rugby Magazine. But as we grow softer, we grow in freedom, for we believe that on the whole we improve; and public feeling, real public feeling, feeling of the weak as well as the strong-has more scope, and asserts its opinions in a truer and a bolder tone. We believe that quasi-literary undertakings such as this, as long as cricket is cricket, football is football, work is work, and Rugby is Rugby, so far from tending to weaken or soften the school, will make a beneficial outlet for genuine school feeling, and latent powers of writing, and will tend to the improvement of our tone, and the honour of our young society.

Again, we do not think that we shall be ill supported; we think that our public will see that we could have begun our project in no other way than we have done, and will let no private ill feeling interrupt the flow of contributions.

Enough we know has been said; we appeal to those fellows with undoubting confidence, to assist us in a project which has been undertaken with no selfish views, but pro bono publico, for all of us without exception: everything and anything will do; prose, poetry, facts, fiction, or facetiæ. And if this trifling paper be a means of serving

our generation in any degree-if it gives a big fellow employment, or a small one amusement-if it draws an English thought out of a silent English mind-if it makes one fellow better and more usefully acquainted with another's inner feelings than he was before-in short, if it leads one member of our body easily over one weary mile of the path of duty, which we all must tread-these random pages will not have been written in vain.

LAY OF THE WATER-TOWER,

The mighty men of Rugby

By all the saints they swore,
That this our town most pleasant,
Should water lack no more.
By all the saints they swore it,
And chose a fitting place,
To build a water-tower thereon,
The water to encase.

East and west and south and north,
The news went spreading fast,
Through hamlet, town, and cottage,
Their messengers have passed.

Fair are the elms, whose sere leaves
Drop in the Avon's rill;
Fat are the sheep and cattle

That graze the Barby bill;
Beyond all brooks, the Clifton,
Is to the fisher dear;

Best of all pools the bather loves

To plunge in Swift's so clear.