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 whom he called Grey.  Which was another cropper—­or whopper.  This strange and illiterate outbreak was printed by the editor with the justly scornful title, “Mr. Chesterton ’Explains’?” Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks.  They meant, of course, “Here is a man who doesn’t know Gray from Shakespeare; he tries to patch it up and he can’t even spell Gray.  And that is what he calls an Explanation.”  That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter, the mistake, and the headline—­as seen from the outside.  The falsehood was serious; the editorial rebuke was serious.  The stern editor and the sombre, baffled contributor confront each other as the curtain falls.

And now I will tell you exactly what really happened.  It is honestly rather amusing; it is a story of what journals and journalists really are.  A monstrously lazy man lives in South Bucks partly by writing a column in the Saturday Daily News.  At the time he usually writes it (which is always at the last moment) his house is unexpectedly invaded by infants of all shapes and sizes.  His Secretary is called away; and he has to cope with the invading pigmies.  Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one.  It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils.  Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly.  He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match.

Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in.  He wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about.  A drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his thoughts; and he is able to observe some newspapers and circulars in wrappers lying on the table.  One is a dingy book catalogue; the second is a shiny pamphlet about petrol; the third is a paper called The Christian Commonwealth.  He opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of a page a sentence with which he honestly disagrees.  It says that the sense of beauty in Nature is a new