mous with valuable work; especially is this so in literary
matters. There are quite a number of writers who, without success,
attempt to be a little of everything. This is not the case with
Chesterton; if he is better as an essayist than as a historian, he is at
least good as the latter; if he is better at paradox than at concise
statements, he can be, if he chooses, quite free from paradox; if he
excels in satire of a light nature, he can also be the most serious of
critics if the subject needs such treatment.

It has often been said that a good prose writer seldom makes a good
poet. This may be to a certain extent a truism; the opposite is more
often the case; that a good poet is quite often a poor producer of
prose. There is a good reason for this: the mind of a poet is probably
of a different calibre to that of a prose writer; a poet must have a
poetical outlook on life and nature; the tree to him is something more
than a tree, it is probably a symbol, but to a prose writer more often
than not a tree is merely a mass of bark and leaves that adorns the
landscape.

Chesterton has written a great many poems, all of which can claim to be
poetical in the true sense, but he has only written one really important
poetical work. It is a ballad that is important for two things; firstly,
it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is
nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good
poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet
Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not
because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to
reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when
good poets are as scarce as really good novelists.

The poem that has established Chesterton for all time as a poet is the
one he has called with true poetical genius 'The Ballad of the White
Horse.' There have been many white horses, but there is The White Horse,
and he lies alone on the side of a hill down Wiltshire way, where he has
watched with a mournful gaze the centuries pass away as the horizon
passes away in a liquid blue.

The White Horse stands for something that year by year we are
forgetting, those quaint old English feasts that have done so much to
make England merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that
bears the name of Alfred. Yet the White Horse is falling into neglect.
The author of 'Tom Brown'