r. This being much appreciated, Your
Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall
next burlesque.

The little group seems certainly at this date to be living in a land
in which 'tis always afternoon. In one house or another tea-time
goes on until signs of dinner make their appearance. The boys only
move from one hospitable dining-room to another, or adjourn to their
own bedrooms where Gilbert piles book on book and reduces even neat
shelves to the same chaos that reigns in his own room.

The Christmas holidays to which the "dramatic journal" belongs came a
few months after the founding of the Junior Debating Club, which
became so central in Gilbert's life and which he treated with a
gravity, solemnity even, such as he never showed later for any cause,
a gravity untouched by humour. It was a group of about a dozen boys,
started with the idea that it should be a Shakespeare Club, but
immediately changed into a general discussion club. They met every
week at the home of one or other and after a hearty tea some member
read a paper which was then debated.

At the age of twenty, when he had left school two years, G.K. wrote a
solemn history of this institution in which the question of whether
it was right or wrong to insist on penny fines for rowdy behaviour is
canvassed with passionate feeling! One boy who was expelled asked to
be readmitted, saying, "I feel so lonely without it." Gilbert's
enthusiasm over this incident could be no greater had he been a
bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the Christian fold. I
suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school,
partly because of the general trend of his thought, partly that at
this later date he was under the influence of Walt Whitman and cast
back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of Whitman
idealism. Anyhow, the Junior Debating Club became to him a symbol of
the ideal friendship. They were Knights of the Round Table. They were
Jongleurs de Dieu. They were the Human Club through whom and in whom
he had made the grand discovery of Man. They were his youth
personified. The note is still struck in the letters of his
engagement period, and it was only forty years later, writing his
_Autobiography_, that he was able to picture with a certain humorous
detachment this group of boys who met to eat buns and criticise the
universe.

A year after their first meeting, the energy of Lucian Oldershaw
produced a magaz