Published they were: under the title, Preachers from the Pew.
March 30th. The second sermon: "The Citizen, the Gentleman and the Savage." Even better than last week. "Where there is no vision the people perisheth."
When it is remembered that the Browning, the Watts, Twelve Types and the Napoleon of Notting Hill had all been published and received with acclaim, it is touching that Frances should speak thus of the "proudest day" of her life. That Gilbert should himself have vision and show it to others remained her strongest aspiration. Not thus felt all his admirers. The Blatchford controversy on matters religious became more than many of them could bear.
A plaintive correspondent (says the Daily News), who seems to have had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things, sends us the following "lines written on reading Mr. G. K. Chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent":
What ails our wondrous "G.K.C."
Who late, on youth's glad wings,
Flew fairylike, and gossip'd free
Of translunary things,
That thus, in dull didactic mood,
He quits the realms of dream,
And like some pulpit-preacher rude,
Drones on one dreary theme?
Stern Blatchford, thou hast dashed the glee
Of our Omniscient Babe;
Thy name alone now murmurs he,
Or that of dark McCabe.
All vain his cloudy fancies swell,
His paradox all vain,
Obsessed by that malignant spell
Of Blatchford on the brain.
H.S.S.*
[* Daily News, 12 January, 1904.]