SCOTTISH UNIVERSITY PRINCIPALS
SIR,—Mr. St. John Ervine is an old hand at controversy, and I am a mere novice. Yet I have always been given to under- stand that the first rule for fair play in this art is to quote the whole of any specific sentence to which objection is taken. Mr. Ervine builds his letter on the last dozen words of a sentence of mine which ran : " Envisage the cherubic Mr. Anthony Bushell, making no pretence of being a day older than himself, as a principal in a country where University principals are invariably nearer eighty than twenty-five." He proceeds to a quite unwarranted assumption that here I, like the rest of my " sour-bellied " generation, am being rude to old age!
I am engaged in dramatic criticism solely and simply, and Mr. Ervine, who can be as harsh as he likes to my generation, must not be unfair to me as a colleague in dramatic criticism. If he must raise this point about the two generations, his and mine, I really cannot see that there is much to choose between the two in this present matter of throwing away the world for an old marching song!
Mr. Ervine's detailed statistics about the ages of University principals seems to me quite irrelevant. To my mind, it no more matters that the first principal I sat under; the late Sir Donald Macalister, was well over eighty, than that the last, the late Sir Robert Rait, was only in his fifties. I revered Sir Donald, and thought Sir Robert a great gentleman. Sir Hector Hetherington, whom Mr. Ervine also mentions, is the present Principal at Glasgow. He taught me all I know of the subject of Logic, and I cannot conceive that Mr. Ervine himself might not have learned something under that same kindly and well-tempered tuition.—Yours,
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