. My friends have always remembered it as
one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the
bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a
swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.

I

That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with
energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters
for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's
verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of
an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that
Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too
some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has
heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but
there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful
tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how
engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.

[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce
Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.]

Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of
his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his
grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother
was wounded at Waterloo.

His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in
France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of
Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and
Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are
in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la
Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an
English wife.

The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at
Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was
called--until 1914.

Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to
live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling
have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel,
became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque
villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.

In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas
Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of
biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this pe