re the war all the
undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room
that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.

II

There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage
to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914);
his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary
France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing
essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly
from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was
very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and
humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906
he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent
spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams
of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here
was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor
startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary
stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not
soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the
early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly
administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign
against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the
very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must
look for leadership and inspiration."

Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's
importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to
a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking
or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in
an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger,
or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S.
Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make
splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of
verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important
contribution?

What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of
Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous
Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human
suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad
necessity a military hos