The joke would have been pointless in any other age. In 1900, directed against the crapulous exoticism of contemporary literature, it was an antidote, childhood was being used as a medicine against an assumed attack of second childhood. The attack began with nonsense rhymes and pictures. It was a complete success from the very first. There is this important difference between the writer of nonsense verses and their illustrator; the former must let himself go as much as he can, the latter must hold himself in. In _Greybeards at Play_, Chesterton took the bit between his teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had ever done. The antitheses of such verses as the following are irresistible: For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says, The duties shine like stars; I formed my uncle's character, Decreasing his cigars. Or The Shopmen, when their souls were still, Declined to open shops-- And cooks recorded frames of mind, In sad and subtle chops. The drawings which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the _sine qua non_ of satire. About a month after Chesterton had produced his statement of his extreme senility (the actual words of the affidavit are I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not], Terrifically old.) he published another little book, _The Wild Knight and Other Poems_, as evidence of his youth. For some years past he had occasionally written more or less topical verses which appeared in The Outlook and the defunct Speaker. _Greybeards at Play_ was, after all, merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of a decade; the second book was a more definite attack upon some points of its creeds and an assertion of the principles which mattered most. There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey, Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth. There is one blasphemy: for death to pray, For God alone knoweth the praise of death. Or again (_The World's Lover_) I stood and spoke a blasphemy-- "Behold the summer leaves are green." It was a defence of reality, crying for vengeance upon the realists. The word realism had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and his followers, especially of Mr. George Moore, who made a sacrifice of nine obvious, clean and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concentrate upon the submersible tenth. Chesterton came out with his defence of the common man, of the streets Where shift in strange democracy The million masks of God, the grass, and all the little things of life, "things" in general, for our subject, alone among modern poets, is not afraid to use the word. If on one occasion he can merely . . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast Stupidity of things,