's journalism was in _The Bookman_; and
in the _Autobiography_ he insists that it was a matter of mere luck:
"these opportunities were merely things that happened to me." While
still at the Slade School, he was, as we have seen, attending English
lectures at University College. There he met a fellow-student, Ernest
Hodder Williams, of the family which controlled the publishing house
of Hodder & Stoughton. He gave Chesterton some books on art to review
for _The Bookman_, a monthly paper published by the firm. "I need not
say," G.K. comments, "that having entirely failed to learn how to
draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the
weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I
had discovered the easiest of all professions, which I have pursued
ever since." But neither in the art criticism he wrote for _The
Bookman_ nor in the poems he was to publish in _The Outlook_ and _The
Speaker_ was there a living. He left the Slade School and went to
work for a publisher.

Mr. Redway, in whose office Gilbert now found himself, was a
publisher largely of spiritualist literature. Gilbert has described
in his _Autobiography_ his rather curious experience of ghostly
authorship, but he relates nothing of his office experience, which is
described in another undated letter to Mr. Bentley:

I am writing this letter just when I like most to write one, late
at night, after a beastly lot of midnight oil over a contribution for
a _Slade Magazine_, intended as a public venture. I am sending them a
recast of that "Picture of Tuesday."

Like you, I am beastly busy, but there is something exciting about
it. If I must be busy (as I certainly must, being an approximately
honest man) I had much rather be busy in a varied, mixed up way, with
half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of
monotonous "study" before me. To give you some idea of what I mean. I
have been engaged in 3 different tiring occupations and enjoyed them
all. (1) Redway says, "We've got too many MSS; read through them,
will you, and send back those that are too bad at once." I go slap
through a room full of MSS, criticising deuced conscientiously, with
the result that I post back some years of MSS to addresses, which I
should imagine, must be private asylums. But one feels worried,
somehow. . . .

(2) Redway says, "I'm going to give you entire charge of the press
depar