avel and of country make up a great part of them: for
this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from
the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the
habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange
advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered
of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his
experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:

The world is not quite infinite--but it is astonishingly full. All
sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and
different ways of action and different goals to which life may be
directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards
long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!),
hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like
another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I
have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am
willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.

That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the
man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of
observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He
does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes
he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of
setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper.
But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his
imagination and his inexhaustible invention.

The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in _The Path to
Rome_:

... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to
rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of
Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last
paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals
with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the
paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.

This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of
_Danton_ came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not
justified of his Fine Writing?

It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the
"poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author
said to himself, "God bless my sou