From a halter and a rope
Far and fast fled all the trators
Far and fast fled all the Graemes
Fled that cursed tribe who lately
Stained there honour and thier names.

CHAPTER III

School Days

CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the _Autobiography_ speak of any
school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court,
usually called at that time Bewsher's, from the name of the
Headmaster. Though it is not technically the preparatory school for
St. Paul's, large numbers of Paulines do pass through it. It stands
opposite St. Paul's in the Hammersmith Road and must have been felt
by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he
nowhere differentiates between the two.

St. Paul's School is an old city foundation which has had among its
scholars Milton and Marlborough, Pepys and Sir Philip Francis and a
host of other distinguished men. The editor of a correspondence
column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "Yes,
Milton and G. K. Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school.
We fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the
school." In an early life of Sir Thomas More we learn of the keen
rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and
St. Paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end
to by Dean Colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when
the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony "pigs" and the pigs
would call the Paulines "pigeons"--from the pigeons of St. Paul's
Cathedral. Now, however, St. Anthony's is no more, and St. Paul's
School has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes'
walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens. Gilbert
Chesterton was twelve when he entered St. Paul's (in January 1887)
and he was placed in the second Form.

His early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation
being to draw all over his books. He drew caricatures of his masters,
he drew scenes from Shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. He
did not at first make many friends. In the _Autobiography_ he makes a
sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a
distinction that could only be drawn by a man. And most men, I fancy,
would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the
transformation occurred. G.K. seems to put it at the beginning of
school life, but the fact that St. Paul's was a day-school meant that
the transition from