Hands a-ready and battle in all:
Words together and wine together
And song together in Balliol Hall.
Rare and single! Noble and few!...
Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!
The only brothers ever I knew,
The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.

* * * * *

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again;
And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
God be with you, Balliol men.

Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever
experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who
finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the
thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy
rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless
throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human
history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never
outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so
imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before 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