the story as seen from the outside, by a man reading the paper; and the
story seen from the inside, by the journalists shouting and telephoning
and taking notes in shorthand through the night.

This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The
notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy
pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics, long
calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant leader of
the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his fanatic soul.
In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not having the fear
of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line "that
wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said because he had
been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought
craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten
rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that orthodox
gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and
post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the mistake.

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it was
a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams, and
cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, for all
I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare and failed
to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress, asking, as
in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a noble
collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and
exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from
the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same
culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to