o _G.K.'s Weekly_. I doubt if he
could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any
lecture.

One of the Basilian Fathers, then a novice, remembers Gilbert's
appearance in Toronto. The subject of this lecture was "Culture and
the Coming Peril." The Coming Peril, he explained, was not Bolshevism
(because Bolshevism had now been tried--"The best way to destroy a
Utopia is to establish it. The net result of Bolshevism is that the
modern world will not imitate it"). Nor by Coming Peril did he mean
another great war (the next great war, he added, "would happen when
Germany tried to monkey about with the frontiers of Poland"). The
Coming Peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological,
artistic overproduction which, equally with economic overproduction,
threatened the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People were
inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of
vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure,
thought, or creation from within themselves.

At question period he was asked:

"Why is Dean Inge gloomy?"

"Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question please."

"How tall are you and what do you weigh?"

"I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately
calculated."

"Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril?"

"Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure."

For an apparently haphazard collection of essays _Sidelights on New
London and Newer York_, published on his return to England from the
second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of
print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is
full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today Chesterton
attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject
them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the
one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is
perfect--and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's
judgment. Talking of the past or of the present, of England or
America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have
been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His
weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions
wrong--to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to
little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and
personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal
standard.