Humour has an unfortunate tendency to stale. The joke of yesteryear already shows frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early volumes of Punch is in the last stages of decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to conceal from his audience the fact that he is repeating one of Shakespeare's puns. We tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because it is thoroughly amusing, but because it has survived better than most. Humorous verse stands a slightly better chance of evoking smiles in its old age. There is always its unalterable verbal neatness; tradition, too, lingers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a poem is a better instance of form than a paragraph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will, but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will live long years. Take for example that last and worst of his novels _The Flying Inn_. Into this he has pitched with a fascinating recklessness a quantity of poems, garnered from The New Witness and worthy of the immortality which is granted the few really good comic poems. There is the poem of Noah, with that stimulating line with which each stanza ends. The last one goes: But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod, Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod, And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eisteddfod; For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God. And water is on the Bishop's board, and the Higher Thinker's shrine, But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine. There is a lunatic song against grocers, who are accused of nonconformity, and an equally lunatic song in several instalments on being a vegetarian: I am silent in the Club, I am silent in the pub, I am silent on a bally peak in Darien; For I stuff away for life Shoving peas in with a knife, Because I am at heart a vegetarian. There is a joyous thing about a millionaire who lived the simple life, and a new version of "St. George for Merry England." Tea, cocoa, and soda-water are the subjects of another poem. The verses about Roundabout are very happy: Some say that when Sir Lancelot Went forth to find the Grail, Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads, For hope that he should fail; All roads led back to Lyonnesse And Camelot in the Vale, I cannot yield assent to this Extravagant hypothesis, The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss Such rumours (_Daily Mail_). But in the streets of Roundabout Are no such factions found, Or theories to expound about Or roll upon the ground about, In the happy town of Roundabout, That makes the world go round. And there are lots more like this.