This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think
it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young
energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked
brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued
passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked
authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of
the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And,
partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the
most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a
tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without
assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite
of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any
reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.

Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:

"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college
friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the
ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone
with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate,
so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly
spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in
his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner
unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."

No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote
the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer
War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and
overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind.