CHAPTER II
SOME EDITORS AND ARNOLD-FORSTER
In a house of such size and with so great a diversity of publications, the Chief Editor is necessarily a personage of importance. It was not long after Cassell had laid out his lines of development that the Chief Editor's post had to be created. The first occupant of whom there is any record was John Willis Clark, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Academically brilliant, he was no editor—"a square peg in a round hole," as Bonavia Hunt said. He was the first to recognize his own unfitness. In the due efflux of time he returned to Cambridge to become Registrar of the University and Town Clerk of the City.
His successor, the Rev. T. Teignmouth Shore, was a different manner of man, and successfully filled the office of Chief Editor for about twenty years. He had graduated young at Trinity College, Dublin, and gone on to Oxford. Having come down too early for ordination, he resolved to try to get some literary work in London, and presented to the firm at La Belle Sauvage letters of introduction from Napier, then Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Doctor F. J. Waller, editor of the Dublin University Magazine, whose daughter Shore afterwards married. Invited at once to act as an assistant editor under Clark, he soon became editor of the Quiver, which Bonavia Hunt took over when Shore was promoted to the chief editorship. The young Irishman thoroughly enjoyed his work. He revelled in his intercourse with literary lions and celebrities of other breeds who visited the Yard, and was persona grata to the staff. Among his frequent callers were Boyd Carpenter, later to become Bishop of Ripon and Canon of Westminster, but then one of the minor clergy in a suburban parish of Kent, who was constantly writing for
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