mber 1890_. Takes an interest in his English work, but otherwise
has not done well.

_July 1891_. He has a decided literary aptitude, but does not trouble
himself enough about school work.

_December 1891. Report missing_.

_July 1892_. Not on the same plane with the rest: composition quite
futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. Not a
quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination.
Conduct always admirable.

What is much clearer from the mass of notebooks and odd sheets of
paper belonging to these years than from the _Autobiography_ is the
degree to which the two processes of resisting and absorbing
knowledge were going on simultaneously. At school he was, he says,
asleep but dreaming in his sleep; at home he was still learning
literature from his father, going to museums and picture galleries
for enjoyment, listening to political talk and engaging in arguments,
writing historical plays and acting them, and above all drawing.

To most of his early writing it is nearly impossible to affix a
date--with the exception of a "dramatic journal," kept by fits and
starts during the Christmas holidays when he was sixteen. G.K.
solemnly tells the reader of this diary to take warning by it, to
beware of prolixity, and it does in fact contain many more words to
many fewer ideas than any of his later writings. But it is useful in
giving the atmosphere of those years. Great part is in dialogue, the
author appearing throughout as Your Humble Servant, his young brother
Cecil as the Innocent Child.

The first scene is the rehearsal of a dramatic version of Scott's
_Woodstock_. This has been written by Your Humble Servant who is at
the same time engaged on a historic romance. At intervals in the
languid rehearsing, endless discussions take place: between Oldershaw
and G.K. on Thackeray, between Oldershaw, his father and G.K. on
Royal Supremacy in the Church of England. The boys, walking between
their two houses, "discuss Roman Catholicism, Supremacy, Papal v.
Protestant Persecutions. Your Humble Servant arrives at 11 Warwick
Gardens to meet Mr. Mawer Cowtan, Master Sidney Wells and Master
William Wells. Conversation about Frederick the Great, Voltaire and
Macaulay. Cheerful and enlivening discourse on Germs, Dr. Koch,
Consumption and Tuberculosis."

"Conservative" Oldershaw regards his friend as a "red hot raging
Republican" and it is interesting to note already faint
foreshadowings of