recent years.

Mr. Mandell and Mr. Shanks in their little study, _Hilaire Belloc: the
Man and his Work_, are more successful in their exposition of Mr.
Belloc's theory of history and the theory of politics which has risen
out of it--or out of which it has risen--than they are in their
definition of him as a man of letters. They have written a lively book
on him, but they do not sufficiently communicate an impression of the
kind of his exuberance, of his thrusting intellectual ardour, of his
pomp as a narrator, of his blind and doctrinaire injustices, of his
jesting like a Roman Emperor's, of the strength of his happiness upon a
journey, of his buckishness, of the queer lack of surprising phrases in
his work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight of
tradition in the manner of his writing. There are many contemporary
writers whose work seems to be a development of journalism. Mr.
Belloc's is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen. He
often writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo of
greatness in his work. He is one of the few contemporary men of genius
whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated. He is an
author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness,
fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was
once to be heard in the Mermaid Tavern.



3. THE TWO MR. CHESTERTONS


I cannot help wishing at times that Mr. Chesterton could be divided in
two. One half of him I should like to challenge to mortal combat as an