“From quiet homes and first beginning Out to the undiscovered ends, There’s nothing worth the wear of winning But laughter and the love of friends.” Who having read these four lines, can forget them? And who but a poet could write them? But Hilaire Belloc has not forced himself into this high mood, nor does he bother to maintain it. He gaily passes on to another verse of drollery, and then, not because he wishes to bring the poem to an effective climax, but merely because it happens to be his mood, he ends the escapade he calls an Ode with eight or ten stanzas of nobly beautiful poetry. There is something almost uncanny about the flashes of inspiration which dart out at the astonished reader of Hilaire Belloc’s most frivolous verses. Let me alter a famous epigram and call his light verse a circus illuminated by lightning. There is that monumental burlesque, the Newdigate Poem--_A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin of Burford to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, “The Benefits of the Electric Light.”_ It is a tremendous joke; with every line the reader echoes the author’s laughter. But without the slightest warning Hilaire Belloc passes from rollicking burlesque to shrewd satire; he has been merrily jesting with a bladder on a stick, he suddenly draws a gleaming rapier and thrusts it into the heart of error. He makes Mr. Lambkin say: “Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough Only because we do not know enough: When Science has discovered something more We shall be happier than we were before.” Here we find the directness and restraint which belong to really great satire. This is the materialistic theory, the religion of Science, not burlesqued, not parodied, but merely stated nakedly, without the verbal frills and furbelows with which our forward-looking leaders of popular thought are accustomed to cover its obscene absurdity. Almost these very words have been uttered in a dozen “rationalistic” pulpits I could mention, pulpits occupied by robustuous practical gentlemen with very large eyes, great favourites with the women’s clubs. Their pet doctrine, their only and most offensive dogma, is not attacked, is not ridiculed; it is merely stated for them, in all kindness and simplicity. They cannot answer it, they cannot deny that it is a mercilessly fair statement of the “philosophy” that is their stock in trade. I hope that many of them will read it. III