the following letters.
U.U.N.S.I.J. Perhaps you would like to work this out all by
yourself--But no, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. The book I
represented was "The Letters of Junius."

Mrs. Meynell never came to know Gilbert well and her daughter says in
the biography that her mother realised his "critical approval"
(admiration would be a better word) of her own work only by reading
his essays. But he once wrote an introduction for a book of hers and
her admiration of him would break out frequently in amusing
exclamations: "I hope the papers are nice to my Chesterton. He is
mine much more, really, than Belloc's."* "If I had been a man, and
large, I should have been Chesterton."**

[* _Alice Meynell_, p. 259.]

[** _Ibid._, p. 260.]

Brimley Johnson, who was to have been Gilbert's brother-in-law, sent
_The Wild Knight_ to Rudyard Kipling. His reply is amusing and also
touching, for Mr. Johnson was clearly pouring out, in interest in
Gilbert's career and in forwarding his marriage with Frances, the
affections that might merely have been frozen by Gertrude's death.

The Elms, Rottingdean,
Nov. 28th.

DEAR MR. JOHNSON,

Many thanks for _The Wild Knight_. Of course I knew some of the
poems before, notably _The Donkey_ which stuck in my mind at the
time I read it.

I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the
work--and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be
curious to see how he'll develop in a few years. We all begin with
arrainging [sic] and elaborating all the Heavens and Hells and stars
and tragedies we can lay our poetic hands on--Later we see folk--just
common people under the heavens--

Meantime I wish him all the happiness that there can be and for
yourself such comfort as men say time brings after loss. It's apt to
be a weary while coming but one goes the right way to get it if one
interests oneself in the happiness of other folk. Even though the
sight of this happiness is like a knife turning in a wound.

Yours sincerely,

RUDYARD KIPLING.

P.S. Merely as a matter of loathsome detail, Chesterton has a bad
attack of "aureoles." They are spotted all over the book. I think
every one is bound in each book to employ unconsciously some pet word
but that was Rossetti's.

Likewise I notice "wan waste" and many "wans" and things that
"catch and cling." He is too good not to be jolte