ce without getting any answer; but it is Christian
to insist, and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to
tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague?
Our PEN club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. If you
would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are
fond of old things: Prague is one. You shall find here so many people
who cherish you. I like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours
sake that being in London I went to habit in Notting-Hill and it is
for yours sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not
meet you again. Please, come to Prague.

I wish you a happy New Year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy,
making your readers happier. You are so good.

Yours sincerely,

KAREL CAPEK.

He never, alas, got to Prague, or to many another country that wanted
him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia, to lecture
again in U.S.A., in South America "to make them aware of English
thought and literature." "The Argentine Intelligencia," says Philip
Guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors
terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise
position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. . . . A visit from
you would mean a very great deal to British intellectual prestige in
these parts."

No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe.
Books have been written about him in many languages and his works
translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish,
Spanish and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for
_The Magazine of International Literature_ as a writer whose works
are well known in the Soviet Union. The Kulturbund in Vienna sends an
emissary inviting him there also and, like Prague, the Vienna P.E.N.
Club wants him.

"You have a distressing habit," Maude Royden once wrote, "of being
the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects."

A visit to Rome in 1929 produced _The Resurrection of Rome_. Despite
brilliant passages the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison
with _The New Jerusalem_ and gives an impression of being thrown
together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their
ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big even for Chesterton.

He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw
it not as primarily pagan but as one mor