ish spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory
over its conqueror. . . ."*

[* _Word Hoard_ by Margaret Williams, p. 4.]

No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense
debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched
its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in
which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have
found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and
for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Caedmon
was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is
stressed, because England is to be thought of as part of Europe--and
the part she is a part of is apparently France!

Yet what excellent things there are in the book:

The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . .

The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken
strength we call the weakness of man.

The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a
story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They
turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite
sure that they themselves were the third volume.

He quotes Troilus and Cressida on "The Christian majesty of the
mystery of marriage":

Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek King sitting
on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but God
in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the
children of men.

When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of
wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and
delicate for being wild.

Romance was a strange by-product of Religion; all the more because
Religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted
having produced it. . . . Even the Church, as imperfectly represented
on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced,
and transformed even what it had abandoned.

The best chapter is the last: The Moral of the Story--and that moral
is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can
cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor
Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real
evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole
body."

Healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the
e