Man is unified in his own being. He is at one with the good things of this world—his habitation. But he is a creature of soul as well as body, and this world is at once a half promise of an eternal destiny and an image of human mortality. Such are the two _natural_ elements of the Bellocian vision, and they define felicitously the best in classical humanism: an acceptance of human nature and of its home, and a realist understanding of the limits of finite perfection. Belloc is earth-rooted, and this renders him happy and melancholy by turns. It is the fate of every humanist, and it is not difficult to see why Belloc suggests Samuel Johnson. Johnson was not a mystic but a humanist, and he is therefore what seems to some a curious mixture of idealism and realism, virtue and cynicism, faith and skepticism. So too with Belloc. Significantly enough, Johnson has been linked with both halves of the Chester-Belloc. Johnson and Chesterton are linked together through their striking Englishness; abstracted, careless in dress, gigantic, they both call to mind the London of Fleet Street. But for all his associations with London, Belloc remains either the man of Paris or the man of the hills of South England. His love of nature and his affinities with life lived close to the soil and the sea provide the key to understanding the differences between the Bellocian and the Chestertonian vision. The two comrades fought together for years for the same truths, but it would be naive to assume that they both saw these truths in the same way. Chesterton was pre-eminently a speculative thinker, but he invested his thoughts with all the warmth and cockney glamour of the gas-lit and fog-filled London he loved. He went through life more abstracted from things than engaged with them, and he took whatever was at hand without reflection: if he drank great quantities of wine, he also drank deeply of water, if water were put before him. But when Chesterton shook himself out of his reveries and gazed on reality, then miracles happened. Romance is always something brought to a thing, and Chesterton invested the whole world with the great goodness of his heart. Chesterton in contact with a _thing_, be it a lamppost or an umbrella, was like the fuse that ignites a Roman candle. Anything at all set his intelligence off on a brilliant fireworks of paradoxes that penetrated into the heart of reality. He was a symbolist, and the inner meaning of creatures was never hidden from his concentration. This world diaphanously let through the glories of another order, and Chesterton could see God in a gable. If his world looks like a pasteboard toy theatre created by a father for the sheer joy of his children, Chesterton could demonstrate that the analogy was strictly true. If the toy was out of order and deranged, the contrast fingered more sharply than ever the primeval origin of the world in goodness.