gence. It is no mere coincidence that the two
cleverest literary debutants of that last decade, Mr. Max Beerbohm and
the subject of this essay, both stepped on the stage making a pretty
exhibition of boredom. When the first of these published, in 1896, being
then twenty-four years old, his Works of Max Beerbohm he murmured in the
preface, "I shall write no more. Already I begin to feel myself a trifle
outmoded. . . . Younger men, with months of activity before them . . .
have pressed forward. . . . _Cedo junioribus._"

So too, when Chesterton produced his first book, four years later, he
called it _Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen_,
and the dedication contained this verse:

Now we are old and wise and grey,
And shaky at the knees;
Now is the true time to delight
In picture books like these.

The joke would have been pointless in any other age. In 1900, directed
against the crapulous exoticism of contemporary literature, it was an
antidote, childhood was being used as a medicine against an assumed
attack of second childhood. The attack began with nonsense rhymes and
pictures. It was a complete success from the very first. There is this
important difference between the writer of nonsense verses and their
illustrator; the former must let himself go as much as he can, the
latter must hold himself in. In _Greybeards at Play_, Chesterton took
the bit between his teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had ever
done. The antitheses of such verses as the following are irresistible:

For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars;
I formed my uncle's character,
Decreasing his cigars.

Or

The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops--
And cooks recorded frames of mind,
In sad and subtle chops.

The drawings which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as
the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the
disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy
which is the _sine qua non_ of satire.

About a month after Chesterton had produced his statement of his extreme
senility (the actual words of the affidavit are

I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not],
Terrifically old.)

he published another little book, _The Wild Knight and Other Poems_, as
evidence of h