ssion is,
as we have said, one of confusion and lack of order: verse, the
revealing instrument, seems to be to Mr. Belloc a pastime for moments of
dispersion, and most of these poems seem to point to intervals of
refreshment, periods of a light use of the powers, rather than to the
seconds of intense feeling whereof verse, either at the time or later,
is the proper expression.

It goes without saying that little enough of this verse is dull: it
nearly all has character, a distinct personal flavour in phrasing and
motive. Yet this flavour is best known to the public in its development
by the first of brilliant young men to be influenced by Mr. Belloc's
style, as apart from his ideas. We may pause a moment to examine this
point, for its own special interest and for the guide it will give us to
Mr. Belloc's poetry.

Rupert Brooke has been called too often the disciple of Dr. Donne: no
critic, so far as we are aware, has called attention to his debt to Mr.
Belloc. This debt was neither complete nor immediately obvious, but it
existed. Brooke knew it, spoke of Mr. Belloc with admiration,
and quoted his poems with surprising memory. Some of these
were--necessarily--unpublished and may be apocryphal: they cannot be
repeated here. The resemblance between the styles of the two men was
most noticeable in Brooke's prose: his letters from America show a touch
in working and a point of view singularly close to those of Mr. Belloc.
But it is also to be discovered in his poetry. Put a few lines from
_Grantchester_ beside a few lines from one of Mr. Belloc's poems of
Oxford and you will realize how curiously the younger man was fascinated
by the older. We will quote the passages we have in mind. The first is
by Brooke:

"In Grantchester, their skins are white,
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth."

And the second is from Mr. Belloc's _Dedicatory Ode_:

"Where on their banks of light they lie,
The happy hills of Heaven between,
The Gods that rule the morning sky
Are not more young, nor more serene....

... We kept the Rabelaisian plan:
We dignified the dainty cloisters
With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,
Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters."

There is a difference, for two men of different character are speaking:
but