If Belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war intellectual (even the post-war Catholic intellectual), the lack of understanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the man, and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part of those most representative of the modern spirit. The ambiguity of Belloc’s position in English letters is rendered still more pronounced in that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated generations, while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number of apparently diverse fields of interest. To some he is known as the founder of the Distributist movement in English economic thought. To others he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and monied aristocracy. In the field of letters, he remains the author of _The Path to Rome_ and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a man profoundly at home in the hills and fields of South England and the Latin Continent. To most, the name Belloc probably conjures up a Catholic Apologetic, for the first time not defensive, but aggressive, militant, and confident in the superiority and the justness of its cause. In time, Belloc encompasses not merely three generations, but two ages. To a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth century, his name may mean an era that never was. Born in the year of the fall of the third Napoleon and the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Belloc marched in the dust of the caissons of the Third Republic when the return of the white flag of Bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of France. His first book was minted in the presses while Victoria was still Queen of England. In him the Oxford Movement of Newman yielded its finest harvest, and Edwardian London was filled with the sound of his laughter, the vigour of his person, and the early splendour of his prose. He belongs to an age now dead.