iscerned the influence of Shaw in _The Napoleon of Notting
Hill_, "but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful humour and
perspicacity."

[* Italics mine.]

Belloc's approval was hearty. He wrote:

I am delighted with what I have read in the _Daily Mail_. Hit them
again. Hurt them. Continue to binge and accept my blessing. Give them
hell. It is the only book of yours I have read right through. Which
shows that I don't read anything. Which is true enough. This letter
is written in the style of Herbert Paul. Continue to bang them about.

You did wrong not to come to the South coast. Margate is a fraud.
What looks like sea in front of it is really a bank with hardly any
water over it. I stuck on it once in the year 1904 so I know all
about it. Moreover the harbour at Margate is not a real harbour.
Ramsgate round the corner has a real harbour on the true sea. In both
towns are citizens not averse to bribes. Do not fail to go out in a
boat on the last of the ebb as far as the Long Nose. There you will
see the astonishing phenomenon of the tide racing down the North
Foreland three hours before it has turned in the estuary of the
Thames, which you at Margate foolishly believe to be the sea. Item no
one in Margate can cook.

Gilbert was not really concerned in this book to bang his
contemporaries about so much as to study their mistakes and so
discover what was wrong with modern thought. Shaw, George Moore,
Ibsen, Wells, The Mildness of the Yellow Press, Omar and the Sacred
Vine, Rudyard Kipling, Smart novelists and the Smart Set, Joseph
McCabe and a Divine Frivolity--the collection was a heterogeneous
one. And in the introduction the author tells us he is not concerned
with any of these men as a brilliant artist or a vivid personality,
but "as a Heretic--that is to say a man whose view of things has the
hardihood to differ from mine . . . as a man whose philosophy is
quite solid, quite coherent and quite wrong. I revert to the
doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general
hope of getting something done."

In _England a Nation_ and even more in the study of Kipling in this
book there is one touch of inconsistency which we shall meet with
again in his later work. He hated Imperialism yet he glorified
Napoleon; himself ardently patriotic he accused Kipling of lack of
patriotism on the ground that a man could not at once love England
and love the Empire. Fo