light,
He said that charities produced
Servility and spite,
And stood upon the other leg
And said it wasn't right.

And then a man named Chesterton
Got up and played with water,
He seemed to say that principles
Were nice and led to slaughter
And how we always compromised
And how we didn't orter.

Then Canon Holland fired ahead
Like fifty cannons firing,
We tried to find out what he meant
With infinite enquiring,
But the way he made the windows jump
We couldn't help admiring.

I understood him to remark
(It seemed a little odd.)
That half a dozen of his friends
had never been in quod.
He said he was a Socialist himself,
And so was God.

He said the human soul should be
Ashamed of every sham,
He said a man should constantly
Ejaculate "I am"
When he had done, I went outside
And got into a tram.

Partly perhaps to console himself for the loss of his son's Daily
company, chiefly, I imagine, out of sheer pride and joy in his
success, Edward Chesterton started after the publication of _The Wild
Knight_ pasting all Gilbert's press-cuttings into volumes. Later I
learnt that it had long been Gilbert's weekly penance to read these
cuttings on Sunday afternoon at his father's house. Traces of his
passage are visible wherever a space admits of a caricature, and
occasionally, where it does not, the caricature is superimposed on
the text.

His growing fame may be seen by the growing size of these volumes and
the increased space given to each of his books. _Twelve Types_ in
1902 had a good press for a young man's work and was taken seriously
in some important papers, but its success was as nothing compared
with that of the _Browning_ a year later. The bulk of _Twelve Types_,
as of _The Defendant_, had appeared in periodicals, but never in his
life did Gilbert prepare a volume of his essays for the press without
improving, changing and unifying. It was never merely a collection,
always a book.

Still, the _Browning_ was another matter. It was a compliment for a
comparatively new author to be given the commission for the English
Men of Letters Series. Stephen Gwynn describes the experience of the
publishers:

On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the
"English Men of Letters," when he was still not quite arrived. Old
Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white
fury, with Chesterton's pr