been a fear of excess of this special let-down that
made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he
was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to
go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said
as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."

The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of
little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the
city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said
when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it
rains now He will have brought it on Himself."

The year of the Congress two other books were published: _Sidelights
on New London and Newer York_, already discussed, and _Chaucer_. The
books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of
his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. The _Chaucer_
was much criticised--chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As
a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not
originate with Chesterton but with Richard de la Mare who had
projected a series of essays called "The Poets on the Poets." This
developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of
Chaucer. But in any event G.K. had all his life combatted the notion
that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely
for the rights of the amateur: yet I think the scholar might well
start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been
called the Father of English poetry, so had "an obscure Anglo-Saxon
like Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in
any sense English." It is a curious example of one of the faults
Chesterton himself most hated--overlooking something because it was
too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work--for
Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.

In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship--_Word
Hoard_--Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a
stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of
England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial
is the view which believes that the English language was a creation
of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English
and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two
finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly
romantic. The Engl