And in many of Hilaire Belloc’s poems by no means intended for childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult and highly artificial simplicity of Professor A. E. Housman’s _A Shropshire Lad_. Take that quatrain _The Early Morning_. It is as clear and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or “literary” phrasing. It is, in fact, conversation--inspired conversation, which is poetry. It might have been written by a Wordsworth not painfully self-conscious, or by a Blake whose brain was not as yet muddled with impressionistic metaphysics. And his Christmas carols--they are fit to be sung by a chorus of children. Can any songs of the sort receive higher praise than that? Children, too, appreciate _The Birds_ and _Our Lord and Our Lady_. Nor is that wonderful prayer rather flatly called _In a Boat_ beyond the reach of their intelligence. Naturally enough, Hilaire Belloc is strongly drawn to the almost violent simplicity of the ballad. Bishop Percy would not have enjoyed the theological and political atmosphere of _The Little Serving Maid_, but he would have acknowledged its irresistible charm. There is that wholly delightful poem _The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter_--a most Bellocian vagabond. “He wandered everywhere he would: and all that he approved was sung, and most of what he saw was good.” Says Peter: “If all that I have loved and seen Be with me on the Judgment Day, I shall be saved the crowd between From Satan and his foul array.” Hilaire Belloc has seen much and loved much. He has sung lustily the things he approved--with what hearty hatred has he sung the things he disapproved! V Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs, drinking songs, battle songs--it is with these primitive and democratic things that he is chiefly concerned. But there is something more democratic than wine or love or war. That thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his Catholic Faith. He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus because he himself is convinced. He does not delve into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the light that is God.”