That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper. But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his imagination and his inexhaustible invention. The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in _The Path to Rome_: ... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found. This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of _Danton_ came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not justified of his Fine Writing? It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the "poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage, ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of human swords," is a glorious piece of writing. From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One may be quoted from an essay called _The Absence of the Past_: There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.