very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not
bother to observe. I remember my mother telling me, when I first came
out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters
and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first
time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. She
was not noticeably successful. Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to
see what everyone else saw. All the time he was seeing qualities in
his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life. And all
this world of imagination had, on his own theory, to be carefully
concealed from his masters. In the _Autobiography_ he describes
himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he
afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and
woodenness of voice; but when he assumes that this is how all boys
behave, he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasms far too
widely. One would rather gather that he supposed the whole of St.
Paul's School to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of
literature from their masters! Such of his own schoolboy papers as
can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age, and an
enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys. A very early
one, to judge by the handwriting, is on the advantages for an
historical character of having long hair, illustrated by the history
of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles the First. In the contrast he
draws between Mary and Elizabeth, appear qualities of historical
imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer.

. . . As in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen, the Trojan
War is stirred up, and great Ajax perishes, and the gentle Patroclus
is slain, and mighty Hector falls, and godlike Achilles is laid low,
and the dun plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of Kings,
so round this lovely giddy French princess, fall one by one the
haughty Dauphin, the princely Darnley, the accomplished Rizzio, the
terrible Bothwell, and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the
weeping eyes of thousands, and is given a popular pity and regret
denied to her rival, with all her faults of violence and vanity, a
greater and a purer woman.

It must indeed have been a terrible scene, the execution of that
unhappy Queen, and it is a scene that has been described by too
many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it. But