Eric Eldred



The Path to Rome

Hilaire Belloc





'. .. AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE'



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK

To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing.

If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many
years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and