y further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper
meaning of the creed he had embraced. He could look back and see how
most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of
Catholic doctrine. . . . He had written what he had seen at the time,
but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he
always continued to see more, the great contemplative.

He looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of
observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he
always had a home. His lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but
the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. When he
wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a
surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby
and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. Frances Chesterton
is among the great wives of our literary history. When he said "I can
never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a
house he was generally in, a house full of things.

He loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an
important fixed part of the day, in the Victorian tradition, and when
he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many
alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which
other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. Other
men are secret drinkers, he would confide, I am a secret teetotaller.
The first time I had tea with him, in Artillery Mansions in 1926, I
was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the
teatable. I imagine he always had time for _Jack Redskin on the
Trail_, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent
I have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring
the contents down in one draught like a champion German beer drinker.
He once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn, Wyndham Lewis's
_Apes of God_ saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see.
It is a folio and I suggested he should take it away. But he opened
it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could
be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents,
as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of
type leaving the pages and being absorbed. When he put it down it was
to discuss the thesis and illustrations of t