Before I leave these two critics I may perhaps say a word or two about their manner towards me. Mr. Belloc’s is rather amusing. I am a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions. I am a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction in biological science. Mr. Belloc is a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions, and a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction—I believe in modern history. He is a younger man than myself, and by that measure less experienced in life and affairs. But for some unfathomable reason he writes as if he were a monstrously wise old historian and I were a bright little boy who had gone to the wrong authorities instead of coming to him before I wrote my little essay. He is lucky not to have adopted this attitude towards me thirty years ago, because then I should have put him across my knees and established a truer relationship in the simple way boys have. Dr. Downey varies in his manner from the pitying and paternal to sprightly defiance. Sometimes he is almost flippant. He closes my last chapter “feeling that— “His talk was like a spring which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses; It slipped from politics to puns, It passed from Mahomet to Moses.” But how else could one write an _Outline of History_? A slight flavour of the encyclopædia is unavoidable, as Dr. Downey will find out for himself when his turn to write an _Outline of History_ arrives; the rocks, and Moses and Mahomet will insist on coming in. If he leaves out the rocks as being irrelevant to a Catholic history, the critics will throw them at him. But in one section Dr. Downey has a third manner with regard to me. When first I turned over Dr. Downey’s pamphlet I was much surprised to find a little group of pages studded with such delightful phrases as “we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells,” “graceful pen,” “sympathy and insight.” The reader will guess, of course, that I rubbed my eyes. He will guess wrong. I did nothing of the sort, I rub my eyes very rarely, but probably they dilated. On Loyola and the Protestant princes, it seems, I am perfectly sound—and then my style becomes admirable.... Yet only the other day I had a letter from an indignant Protestant in Australia explaining that in these very sections my style and my history reached its nadir of smattering ineptitude. § 4 THE HOPE OF A BETTER TEACHING OF HISTORY