ABOUT EDITORS.

Patea Mail, 13 January 1882, Page 3

ABOUT EDITORS.

A well known clergyman of the Presbyterian church has commenced the rather risky task of editing the New Zealand Times. He may succeed, but is more likely to fail, if common experience goes for anything. Clergymen are generally impracticable editors. It is one of the oddest things in life that anybody can edit a newspaper better than the person who does edit it. You find that opinion everywhere. When Charles Dickens started the Daily News in London, the expectation vyas great. He was then the most popular, most entertaining, and apparently most versatile writer of the age. He edited the new paper a few weeks, and then confessed to his intimate friends that the thing was a failure—that he could write a novel, or make a brilliant speech at a banquet, or govern a kingdom, but he could not edit a newspaper with success. He had the sense to give it up, and by doing so he saved himself, from being lost in that grave of genius—the newspaper press. The Times in London is edited at this moment by an ox-professor of Greek ; and during the two first years of his regime, the Times was notably the dullest, slowest, and worst edited paper in London. But the Times takes a deal of killing, and it lived while the Greek scholar was learning to unlearn his oldworld erudition, and live in the light of common day.