Shandygaff

: the enfant terrible of English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Be

Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be gra

C

n introduction by Joyce Kilmer.

at-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his grandmother fought

s "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are in the L

ire Belloc, born at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27,

th he and Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, became his home,

as Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a numbe

le to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his term

hich was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but

e Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by

larship, and the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were d

l years Mr. S

dazzled and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontan

in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer War. It is the perfect expression

IOL MEN STI

when I was

men-and

her in win

ogether un

e heart of us,

ady, but h

ch of us int

evy and ch

ouse that a

a boy and the h

way in the te

nger and thir

de me, Bal

had she gav

of Balliol lo

th you, B

before, and I

n done, and a fa

under the

bout, and a

lonely, hat

there in spit

s heavy for

r of gallopin

utward into

ady and ba

ther and w

gether in B

ngle! Noble

e wasted you

rothers ev

aughed and qua

*

de me, Bal

had she gav

of Balliol lo

th you, B

he hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgro