learnt to draw. Yet how many of the men who did learn
seriously could have drawn those sketches, full of crazy energy and
vitality? I know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how
brilliant are the illustrations to _Greybeards at Play_ or _Biography
for Beginners_, and later to Mr. Belloc's novels. And anyone can see
the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks unfinished
suggestions of humanity or divinity. Anyone, too, can recognise a
portrait of a man, and faces full of character continue to adorn
G.K.'s exercise books. Of living models he affected chiefly
Gladstone, Balfour, and Joe Chamberlin. In hours of thought he made
drawings of Our Lord with a crown of thorns or nailed to a
cross--these suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic
drawings or lecture notes. As the mind wandered and lingered the
fingers followed it, and as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would
even draw on the top of his own notes. He had always had facility and
that facility increased, so that in later years he often completed in
a couple of hours the illustrations to a novel of Belloc's. Nor were
these drawings merely illustrations of an already completed text, for
Mr. Belloc has told me that the characters were often half suggested
to him by his friend's drawings.

On one, at any rate, of his vacations, Gilbert went to Italy, and two
letters to Bentley show much of the way his thoughts were going:

Hotel New York
Florence.
(undated, probably 1894.)

DEAR BENTLEY,

I turn to write my second letter to you and my first to Grey
[Maurice Solomon], just after having a very interesting conversation
with an elderly American like Colonel Newcome, though much better
informed, with whom I compared notes on Botticelli, Ruskin, Carlyle,
Emerson and the world in general. I asked him what he thought of
Whitman. He answered frankly that in America they were "hardly up to
him." "We have one town, Boston," he said precisely, "that has got up
to Browning." He then added that there was one thing everyone in
America remembered: Whitman himself. The old gentleman quite kindled
on this topic, "Whitman was a real Man. A man who was so pure and
strong that we could not imagine him doing an unmanly thing anywhere."
It was odd words to hear at a table d'hote, from your next door
neighbour: it made me quite excited over my salad.

You see that this humanitarianism in which we are ent