llows in the field of letters even when
their philosophy differed from his own. In the obituaries in _G.K.'s
Weekly_ this is especially noticeable. Of two men of letters who died
in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration although with a mind
divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles
whereby he instinctively measured all things. Of Sir Edmund Gosse he
wrote "The men from whom we would consent to learn are dying." G.K.
felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could
learn from Gosse a uniquely "sensitive impartiality." With him "there
passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be
called the spirit of the eighteenth century; which might indeed be
very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilisation."*

[* May 26th, 1928.]

"These are the things we hoped would stay and they are going," he
quoted from Swinburne, and of him and of Hardy, who died in 1928, and
in whom he saluted "an honourable dignity and simplicity" he felt
that though they had stated something false about the universe--that
all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things
unchanged--yet ". . . something rather like it might be a half truth
about the world. I mean about the modern world. . . ." These poets
lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world

it is rather as if, in some inverted witchcraft the rose tree
withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering
in empty air. It is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no
more sun. It is not only the better but the bigger and stronger part
of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary part. The
real evil in the change that has been passing over Society is the
fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken
the palaces and spires. It is as if there was a disease in the world
that only devours the bones. We have not weakened the gilded parody
of marriage, we have only weakened the marriage: . . . we have not
abolished the House of Lords because it was not democratic. We have
merely preserved the aristocracy, on condition that it shall not be
aristocratic. . . . We have not yet even disestablished the Church;
but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it
the only people who really believe it is the Church. . . . There is
now in the minds of nearly all Capitalists a sort of corrupt