Then there are the _Ballades Urbane_ which appeared in the early volumes of The Eye-Witness. They have refrains with the true human note. Such as "But will you lend me two-and-six?" ENVOI Prince, I will not be knighted! No! Put up your sword and stow your tricks! Offering the Garter is no go-- BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX? In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester; he will always have a moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers' ends, or to be quite exact, at the end of his article. He is never quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a man who is not a reformer. Or let us take another set of illustrations, this time in prose. (Once more I protest that I shall not take the reader through all the works of Chesterton.) I mean the articles "Our Note Book" which he contributed to The Illustrated London News. They are of a familiar type; a series of paragraphs on some topical subject, with little spaces between them in order to encourage the weary reader. Chesterton wrote this class of article supremely well. He would seize on something apparently trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. When he had given the disease a name, he went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself "The Skittles Inn." He immediately raises the question, Can we dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis. Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the human soul in them that made them more than fashions. And he concludes: I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times; when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat; and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages of their controversy to the discussion of which of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of calling him "Carrots."