ory of
Britain.

This last passage is valuable, not only because it reveals Mr.
Chesterton as a marvellous rhetorician doing the honours of prose to his
enemies, but because it helps to explain the essentially tragic view he
takes of English history. I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that to
Mr. Chesterton English history is the story of the rise of a governing
class. What it really is to him is the story of a thorn-bush cut down by
a Puritan. He has hung all the candles of his faith on the sacred thorn,
like the lights on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down and
cast out of England with as little respect as though it were a verse
from the Sermon on the Mount. It may be that Mr. Chesterton's sight is
erratic, and that what he took to be the sacred thorn was really a
Upas-tree. But in a sense that does not matter. He is entitled to his
own fable, if he tells it honestly and beautifully; and it is as a
tragic fable or romance of the downfall of liberty in England that one
reads his _History_. He himself contends in the last chapter of the book
that the crisis in English history came "with the fall of Richard II,
following on his failures to use mediaeval despotism in the interests
of mediaeval democracy." Mr. Chesterton's history would hardly be worth
reading, if he had made nothing more of it than is suggested in that
sentence. His book (apart from occasional sloughs of sophistry and
fallacious argument) remains in the mind as a song of praise and dolour
chanted by the imagination about an England that obeyed not God and
despised the Tree of Life, but that may yet, he believes, hear once more
the ancestral voices, and with her sons arrayed in trade unions and
guilds, march riotously back into the Garden of Eden.

IV.

WORDSWORTH

1. HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS

Dorothy Wordsworth--whom Professor Harper has praised not beyond reason
as "the most delightful, the most fascinating woman who has enriched
literary history"--once confessed in a letter about her brother William
that "his person is not in his favour," and that he was "certainly
rather plain." He is the most difficult of all the great poets whom one
reverences to portray as an attractive person. "'Horse-face,' I have
heard satirists say," Carlyle wrote of him, recalling a comparison of
Hazlitt's; and the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that we
find not only in his personal appearance, but in his personality and his
wo