Belloc began quietly enough, in 1895, with a little unimportant book of “Verses and Sonnets.” He followed this in the next four years with four delightfully, irresponsibly absurd books of verses and pictures such as “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts,” “More Beasts for Worse Children,” publishing almost simultaneously in 1899 “The Moral Alphabet” and his notable French Revolution study of “Danton.” In a later year he gave us simultaneously the caustic, frivolous “Lambkin’s Remains” and his book on “Paris,” and followed it with his able monograph on “Robespierre.” It was less unsettling, no doubt, when “Caliban’s Guide to Letters” was closely succeeded by the first and most powerful of his ironic novels, “Emanuel Burden,” but serious people have never known where to have him. He collects his essays under such careless titles as “On Nothing,” “On Anything,” “This and That,” or simply “On”; and the same year that found him collaborating with Cecil Chesterton in a bitter attack on “The Party System,” found him collaborating with Lord Basil Blackwood in the farcical “More Peers,” and issuing acute technical expositions of the battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet. His novels, “Emanuel Burden,” “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” “A Change in the Cabinet,” “The Mercy of Allah,” and the rest, satirize the chicanery and humbug rampant in modern commerce, finance, politics, and general society, and are too much in earnest to attempt to tickle the ears of the groundlings. For four years, in the first decade of the century, Belloc sat in Parliament as Member for Salford, but the tricks, hypocrisies, insincerities of the politicians disgusted and exasperated him; he was hampered and suppressed in the House by its archaic forms, and instead of staying there stubbornly to leaven the unholy lump he came wrathfully out, washing his hands of it, to attack the Party system in the Press, and inaugurate _The Witness_ in which he proceeded to express himself on the iniquities of public life forcefully and with devastating candor.