nger than
those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to
use. But whatever is touched with it is never
again wholly common; whatever is touched with it
takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch,
with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads
of Notting Hill, men will love them, and be afraid
of them for ever."

"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the
King.

"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and
hovels outlast cathedrals," went on the madman.
"Why should it not make lamp-posts fairer than
Greek lamps, and an omnibus-ride like a painted
ship? The touch of it is the finger of a strange
perfection."

"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.

"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the
floor, where his sword lay flat and shining.

If all the dragons of old romance were loosed upon the fiction of our
day, the result, one would imagine, would be something like that of a
Chestertonian novel. But the dragons are dead and converted into poor
fossil ichthyosauruses, incapable of biting the timidest damsel or the
most corpulent knight that ever came out of the Stock Exchange. That is
the tragedy of G.K.C.'s ideas, but it is also his opportunity. "Man is a
creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by
catch-words," says Stevenson. "Give me my dragons," says G.K.C. in
effect, "and I will give you your catch-words. You may have them in any
one of a hundred different ways. I will drop them on you when you least
expect them, and their disguises will outrange all those known to
Scotland Yard and to Drury Lane combined. You may have catastrophes and
comets and camels, if you will, but you will certainly have your
catch-words."

The first of Chesterton's novels, in order of their publication, is _The
Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (1904). This is extravagance itself; fiction
in the sense only that the events never happened and never could have
happened. The scene is placed in London, the time, about A.D. 1984.
"This 'ere progress, it keeps on goin' on," somebody remarks in one of
the novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. But it never goes on as the prophets said
it would, and consequently England in those days does not greatly differ
from the England of to-day. There have been changes, of course. Kings
are now cho