he Blessed Sacrament, was well under way before he
arrived, panting but unperturbed. His apology ran something like
this: "As knights you will understand my not being here at the
beginning, for the whole point of knighthood was that the knight
should arrive late but not too late. Had St. George not been late
there would have been no story. Had he been too late, there would
have been no princess."

Even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying
he had not prepared it. Such a remark is not likely to please any
audience, least of all an audience that has paid for admission and
knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. But money, whether
he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. He had
not a strong voice, and I have seen him, when a microphone was
provided, holding a paper of notes between himself and it. An ardent
admirer of his writing told me he made far too many jokes about his
size. Yet how pleasing they sometimes were: when his Chairman for
instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident:
"Had I met a tram-car," Chesterton replied, "it would have been a
great, and if I may say so, an equal encounter."

He thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying: "I
might call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may
have attended my lectures."

Actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centred entirely
on his subject, not on himself. An anonymous Society Diarist quoted
by Cosmo Hamilton writes of an occasion when: "he was given, rather
foolishly, a little gold period chair and as he made his points it
slowly collapsed under him. He rose just in time and sinking into
another chair that someone put behind him began at the word he had
last spoken. No acting could have secured such an effect of complete
indifference. It was evident that he had barely noticed the incident."

Ellis Roberts completes the picture. He knew Gilbert already as a
brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform:

"I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a
hundred pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencil
(of all colours) and in chalk. All the pages were in a splendid and
startling disorder and I remember being at first a little
disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned and G.K.C. talked."*

[* _Reading for Pleasure_, p. 96.]

At this time Bernard Shaw scored a victory over his friend. For
besid