I regret his absence the less since it may serve as a mute protest against the practice of always bracketing his name with that of Hilaire Belloc. The magic influence of Belloc which is supposed to have colored so many of G. K. C.’s views and opinions and even to have drawn him at length into the Roman Catholic community, must be little but legendary or evidence of it would be apparent in his writings, and it is no more traceable there than the influence of Chesterton is to be found in Belloc’s books. They share a dislike of Jews, which nearly equals that of William Bailey in “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election”; Chesterton has illustrated some of Belloc’s stories, and Belloc being an artist, too, has made charming illustrations for one of his own travel volumes. All the same, there is no more real likeness between them than there was between Dickens and Thackeray, or Tennyson and Browning, who were also, and are to some extent still, carelessly driven in double harness. Belloc’s humor and irony are hard, often bitter; they have none of the geniality, nimbleness, perverse fantasy of Chesterton’s. The one has a profound respect for fact and detail, and learns by carefully examining all the mechanical apparatus of life scientifically through a microscope; while the other has small reverence for facts as such, looks on life with the poet’s rather than with the student’s eye, and sees it by lightning-flashes of intuition. When Chesterton wrote his History of England he put no dates in it; he felt that dates were of no consequence to the story; but Belloc has laid it down that, though the human motive is the prime factor in history, “the external actions of men, the sequence in dates and hours of such actions, and their material conditions and environments must be strictly and accurately acquired.” There is no need to labor the argument. “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” is not more unlike “Emanuel Burden” than their two authors are unlike each other, individually and in what they have written. Born at St. Cloud in 1870, Belloc was the son of a French barrister; his mother, an Englishwoman, was the grand-daughter of Joseph Priestley, the famous scientist and Unitarian divine. She brought him over to England after the death of his father, and they made their home in Sussex, the country that has long since taken hold on his affections and inspired the best of his poems. I don’t know when he was “living in the Midlands,” or thereabouts except while he was at Oxford, and earlier when he was a schoolboy at the Birmingham Oratory and came under the spell of Cardinal Newman, and I don’t know when he wrote “The South Country,” but not even Kipling has crowned Sussex more splendidly than he crowns it in that vigorous and poignant lyric-- “When I am living in the Midlands, That are sodden and unkind, I light my lamp in the evening; My work is left behind; And the great hills of the South Country Come back into my mind.