Essays on whatever was in front of him: gargoyles, telegraph poles, a drama of dolls, cheese, a criminal head, the gold of Glastonbury, the white horses cut in the chalk downs, the field of Ethandune where Alfred beat the Danes. Chesterton is at his best at this length, turning a small thing over until it shows the whole of his philosophy, and the English landscape pieces are among the finest things he wrote. Sixty plates of English landscape and weather by painters such as Constable and Turner, from Salisbury Cathedral to Dutch Boats in a Gale, answer the essays with their own small, noticed things.
