of his sentences.

Unfortunately, his two personalities have become so confused that his
later books sometimes strike one as being not so much a game played with
light as a game of hide-and-seek between light and darkness. In the
darkness he mutters incantations to the monstrous tyrannies of old time:
in the light he is on his knees to liberty. He vacillates between
superstition and faith. His is a genius at once enslaved and
triumphantly rebel. This fatal duality is seen again and again in his
references to the tyrannies of the Middle Ages. Thus he writes: "It need
not be repeated that the case despotism is democratic. As a rule its
cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak." I confess I do not know
the "rule" to which Mr. Chesterton refers. The picture of the despot as
a good creature who shields the poor from the rich is not to be found
among the facts of history. The ordinary despot, in his attitude to the
common people suffering from the oppressions of their lords, is best
portrayed in the fable--if it be a fable--of Marie Antoinette and her
flippancy about eating cake.

I fancy, however, Mr. Chesterton's defence of despots is not the result
of any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history: it is due
simply to his passion for extremes. He likes a man, as the vulgar say,
to be either one thing or the other. You must be either a Pope or a
revolutionist to please him. He loves the visible rhetoric of things,
and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral in
comparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps of
liberty on the other. This, I think, explains Mr. Chesterton's
indifference to, if not dislike of, Parliaments. Parliaments are
monuments of compromise, and are guilty of the sin of unpicturesqueness.
One would imagine that a historian of England who did not care for
Parliaments would be as hopelessly out of his element as a historian of
Greece who did not care for the arts. And it is because Mr. Chesterton
is indifferent to so much in the English genius and character that he
has given us in his recent short _History of England_, instead of a
History of England, a wild and wonderful pageant of argument. "Already,"
he cries, as he relates how Parliament "certainly encouraged, and almost
certainly obliged" King Richard to break his pledge to the people after
the Wat Tyler insurrection:--

Already Parliament is not merely a governing body, but a governing