Gilbert Keith Chesterton

es, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.

For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of tithes for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in The Coloured Lands. Others are hints later used in his own novels: there is a fragment of The Ball and the Cross, a first suggestion for The Man Who Was Thursday, a rather more developed adumbration of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This I think is later than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting, apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost imposs