at he was now prepared "to write a disloyal triolet!"
This was during the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was
convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary
productions with their illustrations, but where they are I do not
know.*

[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, pp. 36-37.]

On a second visit of the Chestertons to Lotus, George Wyndham was
there. He had told us of his habit of "shouting the Ballad of the
White Horse to submissive listeners" and we had hoped for the same
treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying
us to recover it. We had at that time a vast German cook--of a girth
almost equal to his own and possessed of unbounded curiosity in the
matter of our guests. Gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in
the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he
supposed to be a laundry list, and then started back exclaiming that
she had thought him to be Mrs. Ward.

It was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be
the granddaughter of a Duke: "You and I who belong to the jolly old
upper Middle Classes." Had he been told about her ancestry he would,
I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by
not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and
Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same
calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of
mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland
and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would
drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well as her
own for a certain simplicity of life. Social position neither excited
nor irritated him. He liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he
liked or disliked a postman. Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton really
were, as Conrad Noel said, personally unconcerned about class. They
had, however, a principle against the position of the English
aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their
general social and historical outlook. What might be called the
social side of it was often expressed by G.K. when lecturing on
Dickens. Thus, speaking at Manchester for the Dickens centenary, he
was reported as saying:

The objection to aristocracy was quite simple. It was not that
aristocrats were all blackguards. It was that in an aristocratic
state, people sat in a huge darkened theatre and only t