tment, sending copies to Reviews, etc." Consequence is, one has
to keep an elaborate book and make it tally with other elaborate
books, and one has to remember all the magazines that exist and what
sort of books they'd crack up. I used to think I hated
responsibility: I am positively getting to enjoy it. (3) There is
that confounded "Picture of Tuesday" which I have been scribbling at
the whole evening, and have at last got it presentable. This sounds
like mere amusement, but, now that I have tried other kinds of hurry
and bustle, I solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no
work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication.
Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it
somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them
out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four
hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I
ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway's. The worst of it is that
you always think the thing so bad too when you're in that state. I
can't imagine anything more idiotic than what I've just finished.
Well, enough of work and all its works. By all means come on Monday
evening, but don't be frightened if by any chance I'm not in till
about 6.30, as Monday is a busy day. Of course you'll stop to
dinner . . . what an idiotically long time 8 weeks is. . . .

This letter does not seem to bear out the suggestion in Cecil's book*
of Gilbert's probable uselessness to the publishers for whom he
worked. After all, literacy is more needful to most publishers than
automatic practicality, because it is so very much rarer. Probably
G.K. would have been absolutely invaluable had he been a little less
kind-hearted. His dislike of sending back a manuscript and making an
author unhappy would have been a bar to his utility as a reader. But
there are lots of other things to do besides rejecting manuscripts,
and two later letters show how capable Gilbert was felt to be in
doing most of them.

[* _G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism_, see p. 23.]

The exact date at which he left Redway's for the publishing firm of
Fisher Unwin (of 11 Paternoster Buildings) I cannot discover, but it
was fairly early and he was several years with Fisher Unwin, only
gradually beginning to move over into journalism.

"He did nothing for himself," says Lucian Oldershaw, "till we
[Bentley an