as the
dawn. Seen from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief
every morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come out
without the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on
discovering the North Pole.

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality)
from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little
episode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and
instructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There
are really two stories: the story as seen from the outside, by a
man reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by the
journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand
through the night.

This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The
notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy
pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics,
long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant
leader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his
fanatic soul. In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not
having the fear of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote
the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said
because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because
he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and
forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that
orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five
letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the
mistake.

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it
was a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams,
and cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, for
all I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare and
failed to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress,
asking, as in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a
noble collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and
exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from
the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same
culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to
Shakespeare, but to a poet