head (not mine) and when in fact no
man ever went to the writing of a literary work with less confidence.

You can find no dates in this History and a minimum of facts, but you
can find vision. The history professors at London University said to
Lawrence Solomon that it was full of inaccuracies, yet "He's got
something we hadn't got." G.K. might well have borrowed from Newman
and called it an Essay in Aid of a History of England. He showed
"something of the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire
into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards
gave birth, was baptised into a promise or at least into a hope of
permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed
with immortality."

The English people had been free and happy as a part of this great
thing, cultivating their own land, establishing by their Guilds a
social scheme based upon "pity and a craving for equality," building
cathedrals and worshipping God, with the "Holy Land much nearer to a
plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than
Runnymede." All life was made lovely by "this prodigious presence of
a religious transfiguration in common life" and only began to darken
with the successful "Rebellion of the Rich" under Henry VIII.

Probably too big a proportion is given by Chesterton to the great
crime that overshadowed for him the rest of English history. Yet he
does justice in brilliant phrasing to the Eighteenth Century Whigs:
still more to Chatham and Burke and to Dr. Johnson whom he so loved
and to whom he was often compared. But supremely he loved Nelson "who
dies with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve." For
Nelson was the type and chief exemplar of the ordinary Englishman.

. . . the very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are
touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm
of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and
failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that
he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not
foiled by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a
spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it
fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself
prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already
calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory
chimneys alr