li's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic
taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a
fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I
remember, the refrain:

"Singing Chooral-i-chooral-i-tiddity
Also--Chooral-i-chooral-i-tay
And chanting Chooral-i-chooral-i-dititty
Not forgetting--chooral-i-chooral-i-day--"

Vernede sang a Sussex pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined
way which was exquisitely incongruous: Waldo and Langdon-Davies also
sang. I recited an Ode which I had written for the occasion and
Lucian recited one of Bentley's poems that came out in an Oxford
magazine. Then we sang the Anthem* of the J.D.C., of which the words
are, "I am a Member--I'm a Member--Member of the J.D.C. I belong to
it forever--don't you wish that you were me."

[* It was sung to the tune of "Clementine."]

Then we paid the bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs
in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then we broke up.

There now. Five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in
it. How relieved you must be, wearied out with allusions to your hair
and your soul and your clothes and your eyes. And yet it has been
every word of it about you really. I like to make my past vivid to
you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole, a
fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, with the
very soul of youth in it. Not only because I am a victim of the
prejudice, common I trust to all mankind, that no one ever had such
friends as I had. . . .

Readers of the _Autobiography_ will remember that many many years
later, at the celebration of Hilaire Belloc's sixtieth birthday, the
guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion.
Chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he
spoke of the Belloc birthday party as the only dinner in his life at
which every diner made a speech.

Two more extracts from his letters must be given, showing the efforts
made by Frances to look after Gilbert, and his reactions. One of his
friends remarked that Gilbert's life was unique in that, never having
left home for a boarding school or University, he passed from the
care of his mother to the care of his wife. I think too that the
degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him
with the feeling that while he m