neness and,
to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who
achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a
kind rare in its appearances.

But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse,
we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express
his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original
spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define,
not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the
value of the thing which he expresses.

Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the
chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and
the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a
spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are
told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French blood: it is the essence of the
Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the
glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and
secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.

This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what
might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited
capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often
quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine
writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in
words.

It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole
rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the
security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and
periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls
admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth
century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the
undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude
without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has
the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or
extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his
relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of
exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his
qualifying clauses.

It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by
a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections,