FIRST LAMPY GIVES OLD PRESIDENT PAIN

The following review of the Freshman Number of the Lampoon was written for the CRIMSON by David T. W. McCord '21, former president of the Lampoon, and now editor of the Alumni Bulletin.

It is rather a pity that the Freshman number of the Lampoon, something supposedly, to agitate the thoracic vertebra of the very youngest class, should be the first number of the year. It is generally such a lame affair, for which, let us add, there is some slight reason. Two or more summer months of idleness, a flood of special deliveries and telegrams the week before college opens, a few haphazard, pointless contributions by editors whose thoughts are at the time still waiting for the sunrise, and the lone editor who has returned to Cambridge, duty-bound and royally peevish, scrambles the horrible collection together, shouts to the printer, falls into bed, and another "Freshman number" looks the Square in the eye. That is the probable truth of it.

Praise for Cover Alone

We must say that the cover on the present seventh wonder is exceptionally fine and worthy of the standard Mr. Child has long since set for himself. Having peered behind it, however, we cannot, unlike Alice, recall any adventures--no, we must find the Carpenter and shed another tear. . . . Swallowing hard, we escape from the prologue to the editorial page. What, O Lampy, Ibis, Blot! What has become of the magic pen? Where is the gentle flow of easy banter and the singular style that once outran alike sophomoric itchings and threadiness of subject? Such a bare veneer of it is the first editorial; and the rest, indeed, somewhat less than three paragraphs of silence. The style of Lampy has always been traditional. It must always be so; it must be perpetuated. To the limbo of Lampooniana, you editors who do not know it; to the limbo, and let scissors, inkpot, paste, and neophyte stand waiting until you have searched and found, tugged and pulled, and dragged into editorial light the sacred phial which holds the essence of Lampy. In that, then, did your pens.

The Less Said the Better

The less we say the better. The jokes and articles are uniformly poor; the drawings for the most part little more. A frontispiece sketch depicting the infant freshman, lost amid a pile of grips, packages and steamer rugs, and finally unwound and revealed in the college office is the best of the lot. But who are the strange individuals in it masquerading as Deans? Can one of them be Mr. Whitney? We should like pleasantly to remark first that the "multitude of shins" idea, embodied in one of Ibis's "inklings" is as old, about, as Don Marquis (He isn't really very old); secondly, that the apologies under the "letter of a Japanese Freshman"--and quite the best bit of prose in the issue--would be more in order if made to the original author of the Schoolboy Epistles, Mr. Wallace Irwin, rather than to the fictitious and mysterious Ervine. Having been wholly disagreeable thus far, may we exhort the Lampoon Editors to pull together and return with the next number to work that will lift the eyebrows of 1928 and prove that Lampy is still what it has been since 1876--our first and foremost college weekly