A brooding sense of inevitable personal death, prefigured by the passing of friends and the advance of age, haunts a great deal of his writing, and invests it with a solemn majesty that recalls again the great Doctor Johnson, a humanist who faced the end with bleak courage and somber faith. There is an essay in Belloc’s _Towns of Destiny_ titled “Cornetto, of the Tarquins” in which his emotional skepticism emerges into light in an almost pure state. Speaking of those tombs which are of the origins of us all, Belloc makes us aware of the “subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed on Rome and from which we all inherit.”[18] Humanism, even Christian humanism, must pay a price for its achievement of the earthly home, and that price, frequently enough, is the temptation to skepticism. “Then I thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not whence it came, nor whither it goes.”[19] The bourgeois world has romanticized death so that it can escape facing that most monstrous of indignities. Belloc, on the contrary, views death steadily as the threat to his humanity which must be explained without being explained away. The final destruction of that precious crucible of human existence, the individual personality, cannot be thought without contradiction. Everything in man is a drive toward being. If he is sane, man aims at becoming more and more himself, and to break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself. The Dead do not die, cries the old Roman in Belloc. But what can testify to this inner conviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of human nature for survival? Man ought to continue to be, but all man can see is the passing of things in the eternal rhythm of generation and corruption.