He was the finest prose stylist of his generation. His art was a habit, possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious of his own power. John Edward Dineen has noted how writers of such diverse interests and talents as Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of Hilaire Belloc.[64] Baring’s famous tribute is well known: “grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played ’cello ... solemn, melancholy and majestic.” Belloc’s prose at its finest was what great prose ought to be: a sensitive instrument adapted to express, with great precision and subtle nuance, the complex genius of its creator. His was an artistry that was largely unmannered, simple, sparing in metaphor, and still remarkably rich: a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins of classical English. “No man,” says Lord Tweedsmuir, “has attained more perfectly to the ‘piety of speech’ of the seventeenth century; no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.”[65] It is no exaggeration to say that Belloc’s prose, rooted as it was in the highest literary tradition, will be read as long as English prose is read by men trained in that great heritage. Belloc often put forth the older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning. To this end he developed an unadorned, plain style as the apt instrument for the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas. _The Restoration of Property_, _The House of Commons and Monarchy_, _The Stane Street_ and, most especially, _The Servile State_ are the finest examples of Belloc’s working in a manner that is almost dry in its cold lucidity. The writing in these books is severely unrhetorical and refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary academic prose; here Belloc achieves personality in his style only by the constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military character: _this_ Belloc is the French logician who can make an idea march to a conclusion. Belloc’s plain style recalls the older Oxford manner and suggests the Newman of the _Parochial Sermons_ and _The Arians of the Fourth Century_. Belloc’s lyricism is found perhaps at the height of its perfection in _The Path to Rome_, _Esto Perpetua_, and in the little-known translation of Bedier’s _The Romance of Tristan and Iseult_. But for vintage Belloc, we must turn to the essays, and most especially to _Hills and the Sea_. There is the grave style of “The Death of a Ship”; there is the delicious parody of his grave style in “The Lost Manuscript.” Then there is the anecdotal Belloc telling a story for the sheer love of adventure recalled. There is the humorous Belloc of the Great Fool passages. Finally there is the summing up of a life’s vision—once again, _Esto Perpetua_.