Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation. ”

“ Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. ”

“ It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. ”

“ Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. ”