WCP1530

[1]

60 Overstrand Mansions

Battersea Park

Dear Dr Russell Wallace

My only excuse for having neglected your most generous letter for so long is that I was so much pleased and impressed with it. I am not altogether used to receiving letters from the most distinguished figures of the last century and when I do, I put off answering them with a vague notion of answering them well. Thus it happens that the letters I write last are those that I am most eager to write. This, I suppose, is a "paradox"; it is also a fact.

As it is, the habit has put me in a hole this time for I have to acknowledge your letter, not as I had hoped, at a length & in a manner that would have properly expressed my gratitude & my admiration, but have, on the [2] contrary, to acknowledge it in a moment of great hurry & vagueness. I have only space to say that if regarding you as one of the great men of the nineteenth century be a clever paradox it is one that I was taught, so to speak, at my mother's knee, and have heard from every educated man I ever heard discussing the point.

I must, with sadness, confess that not responsible either for the value or the inaccuracies of the list of your works in the "English Illustrated". I only wrote the "literary" stuff; the other was worked up, I suppose by some clerk in the office of the paper, deeply read in scientific & philosophical literature. Of what I wrote I can only say that I meant it most sincerely & wish I could have put it better. Thank you, once again.

Yours very sincerely

G. K. Chesterton [signature]