guns, the guns,
But She went on before."

Since that small riot of ours he may be said without exaggeration to
have worked three revolutions: the first in all that was represented by
the _Eyewitness_, now the _New Witness_, the repudiation of both
Parliamentary parties for common and detailed corrupt practices;
second, the alarum against the huge and silent approach of the Servile
State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and
third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In
all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of
patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There
was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety,
and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs
to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of
peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic and, in the
literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French
people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of
themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may
be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in
his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of
quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild
things, the things must not be too wild. A wild Englishman like Blake or
Shelley is content with dreaming them. How Latin is this combination
between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc
with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish
wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and
domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his
language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even
when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often
restrained; it is the substance that is violent. There is many a
paragraph of accusation he has written which might almost be called dull
but for the dynamite of its meaning.

It is probable that I have dealt too much with this phase of him, for it
is the one in which he appears to me as something different, and
therefore dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic
guide-books which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of
Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom
Keats conceiv