_Varied Types_ _By_ G.K. Chesterton Author _of_ "The Defendant," etc. New York: _Dodd, Mead and Company_ PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1905 NOTE These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with the kind permission of the Editors of _The Daily News_ and _The Speaker_. G.K.C. Kensington. CONTENTS Page Charlotte Brontë 3 William Morris And His School 15 The Optimism Of Byron 29 Pope And The Art Of Satire 43 Francis 59 Rostand 73 Charles II. 85 Stevenson 97 Thomas Carlyle 109 Tolstoy And The Cult Of Simplicity 125 Savonarola 147 The Position Of Sir Walter Scott 159 Bret Harte 179 Alfred The Great 199 Maeterlinck 209 Ruskin 217 Queen Victoria 225 The German Emperor 227 Tennyson 249 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 261 CHARLOTTE BRONTË Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.