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10 G. K. CHESTERTON forsaken, of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech) but let atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation ; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. During all these years books and articles were pouring out from his pen with bewildering rapidity. In literary biography he followed up his study of Browning with a study of Dickens. He used his experience as an art-student to add to these studies of G. F. Watts and Blake* He wrote a criticism of the man with whom throughout his lifetime he remained in unending friendly controversy, Bernard Shaw. In all, Chesterton wrote eight literary biographies— on G. F. Watts, Robert Browning, Dickens, Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Cobbett, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Chaucer. We may add St. Thomas Aquinas to that if we wish to call that a literary biography. In addition, he was continually throwing at the world his passing literary judgements in works as various as his volume on the Victorian Age in Literature for the Home University Library or his articles which appeared in the central page of the Illustrated London News every week for almost the last quarter of a century of his life. As was only to be expected of a writer so uncritically fertile, his literary judgements varied in merit. He had no talent at all—as he himself was the first to confess —for what is sometimes called pure literary criticism—for arguments about form and manner. His whole interest was in ideas. As a consequence, the least successful of his biographies, as is generally agreed, are those on Watts and Stevenson, where his subject threw down no clear dogmatic challenge to the ideas of his age, Blake also was a failure because Chesterton's weapon was reason and he could not be at home with one who despised reason. On the other hand, Browning, written when Chesterton was still a young