It was Mr. Shaw who, in the course of a memorable controversy, invented
a fantastic pantomime animal, which he called the "Chester-Belloc." Some
such invention was necessary as a symbol of the literary comradeship of
Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. For Mr. Belloc and Mr.
Chesterton, whatever may be the dissimilarities in the form and spirit
of their work, cannot be thought of apart from each other. They are as
inseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illumines
this side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned with
announcing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through the
dangerous currents of our times. Fifty years ago, when philology was one
of the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain credit
for the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the Heavenly
Twins going about the earth with corrupted names. Chesterton is merely
English for Castor, and Belloc is Pollux transmuted into French.
Certainly, if the philologist had also been an evangelical Protestant,
he would have felt a double confidence in identifying the two authors
with Castor and Pollux as the

Great Twin Brethren,
Who fought so well for Rome.

A critic was struck some years ago by the propriety of the fact that Mr.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc brought out books of the same kind and the
same size, through the same publisher, almost in the same week. Mr.
Belloc, to be sure, called his volume of essays _This, That, and the
Other_, and Mr. Chesterton called his _A Miscellany of Men._ But if Mr.
Chesterton had called his book _This, That, and the Other_ and Mr.
Belloc had called his _A Miscellany of Men_, it would not have made a
pennyworth of difference. Each book is simply a ragbag of essays--the