intive correspondent (says the _Daily News_), who seems to have
had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things,
sends us the following "lines written on reading Mr. G. K.
Chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent":

What ails our wondrous "G.K.C."
Who late, on youth's glad wings,
Flew fairylike, and gossip'd free
Of translunary things,

That thus, in dull didactic mood,
He quits the realms of dream,
And like some pulpit-preacher rude,
Drones on one dreary theme?

Stern Blatchford, _thou_ hast dashed the glee
Of our Omniscient Babe;
Thy name alone now murmurs he,
Or that of dark McCabe.

All vain his cloudy fancies swell,
His paradox all vain,
Obsessed by that malignant spell
Of Blatchford on the brain.

H.S.S.*

[* _Daily News_, 12 January, 1904.]

Mr. Noel has a livelier memory of Gilbert's religious and social
activities. On one occasion he went to the Battersea flat for a
meeting at which he was to speak and Gilbert take the chair, to
establish a local branch of the Christian Social Union. The two men
got into talk over their wine in the dining-room (then still a
separate room) and Frances came in much agitated. "Gilbert you must
dress. The people will be arriving any moment.

"Yes, yes, I'll go."

The argument was resumed and went on with animation. Frances came
back. "Gilbert, the drawing-room is half full and people are still
arriving." At last in despair she brought Gilbert's dress-clothes
into the dining-room and made him change there, still arguing. Next
he had to be urged into the drawing-room. Established at a small
table he began to draw comic bishops, quite oblivious of the fact
that he was to take the chair at the now assembled meeting. Finally
Frances managed to attract his attention, he leaped up overthrowing
the small table and scattering the comic bishops.

"Surely this story," said a friend to whom I told it, "proves what
some people said about Chesterton's affectation. He must have been
posing."

I do not think so, and those who knew Gilbert best believed him
incapable of posing. But he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and
of sulking like a schoolboy. It amused him to argue with Mr. Noel, it
did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. So, as he
was not allowed to go on arguing, he drew comic bishops.

There was, too, more than a touch of this wilfulness in the second
shock he adm