John Burns."
"Good friends and very gay companions," Gilbert calls the Christian
Social Union group of whom, beside Conrad Noel, were Charles
Masterman, Bishop Gore, Percy Dearmer, and above all Canon Scott
Holland. Known as "Scotty" and adored by many generations of young
men, he was "a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so
that his broad mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace
of restraint."* Like Gilbert, he suffered from the effect of urging
his most serious views with apparent flippancy and fantastic
illustrations. In the course of a speech to a respectable Nottingham
audience he remarked, "I dare say several of you here have never been
in prison."
[* _Autobiography_, p. 169.]
"A ghastly stare," says Gilbert, describing this speech, "was fixed
on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my
own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own
problem."
Gilbert's verses, summarizing the meeting as it must have sounded to
a worthy Nottingham tradesman, are quoted in the _Autobiography_ and
completed in _Father Brown on Chesterton_.
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