as far as personal taste and instincts
are concerned, I share all your antipathy to the noisy Plebian
excursionist. A visit to Ramsgate during the season and the vision of
the crowded, howling sands has left in me feelings which all my
Radicalism cannot allay. At the same time I think that the lower
orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. In labour and
trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. Your suggestion as to
a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me
to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort. The
order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if I
include the list I have in mind for the future thus--Danton, William
III, Simon de Montfort, Rousseau, David and Russell. . . . I rejoice
to say that this is a sequestered spot into which Hi tiddly hi ti,
etc. and all the ills in its train have not penetrated.

In these last two letters there are sentences of a kind not to be
found anywhere else in Chesterton. The disparagement of Lucian
Oldershaw's excessive enthusiasm for the Junior Debating Club, the
solemn reprobation of the "imbecile screams and yells and stamping"
of the last day at school before the summer holidays, the antipathy
expressed for the rowdy enjoyments of the lower orders--these things
are not in the least like either the Chesterton that was to be or the
Chesterton that then was. But they are very much like Bentley. He was
two years younger than Chesterton, but far older than his years and
seemed indeed to the other boys (and perhaps to himself) like an
elderly gentleman smiling a remote amused smile at the enthusiasms of
the young. I get the strongest feeling that at this stage Chesterton
not only admired him--as he was to do all his life--but wanted to be
like him, to say the kind of thing he thought Bentley would say. This
phase did not last, as we shall see; it had gone by the time
Chesterton was at the Slade School.

6, The Quadrant,
North Berwick
Haddington, Scotland.
(undated, probably 1891.)

DEAR BENTLEY,

We have been here three days and my brother loudly murmurs that we
have not yet seen any of "the sights." For my part I abominate
sights, and all people who want to look at them. A great deal more
instruction, to say nothing of pleasure is to be got out of the
nearest haystack or hedgerow taken quietly, than in trotting over two
or th