It would be unfair to offer this passage as an example of Mr. Belize’s dominating genius, but it is an excellent example of his domineering temper.  His genius and his temper, one may add, seem, in these essays, to, be always trying to climb on one another’s shoulders, and it is when his genius gets uppermost that he becomes one of the most biting and exhilarating writers of his time.  On such occasions his malice ceases to be a talent, and rises into an enthusiasm, as in The Servants of the Rich, where, like a mediaeval bard, he shows no hesitation in housing his enemies in the circles of Hell.  His gloating proclamation of the eternal doom of the rich men’s servants is an infectious piece of humour, at once grim and irresponsible:—­

Their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom....  These are those men who were wont to come into the room of the Poor Guest at early morning, with a steadfast and assured step, and a look of insult.  These are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm’s length, as much as to say:  “What rags these scribblers wear!” and then, casting them over the arm, with a gesture that meant:  “Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!” would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco....

...  Then one would see him turn one’s socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe.  Then a great bath would be trundled in, and he would set beside it a great can, and silently pronounce the judgment that, whatever else was forgiven the middle-class, one thing would not be forgiven them—­the neglect of the bath, of the splashing about of the water, and of the adequate wetting of the towel.

     All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands.  But
     be comforted.  They writhe in Hell with their fellows.

Mr. Belloc is not one of those authors who can be seen at their best in quotations, but even the mutilated fragment just given suggests to some extent the mixture of gaiety and malice that distinguishes his work from the work of any of his contemporaries.  His gifts run to satire, as Mr. Chesterton’s run to imaginative argument.  It is this, perhaps, which accounts for the fact that, of these two authors, who write with their heads in the Middle Ages, it is Mr. Chesterton who is the more comprehensive critic of his own times.  He never fights private, but always public, battles in his essays.  His mediaevalism seldom degenerates into a prejudice, as it often does with Mr. Belloc.  It represents a genuine theory of the human soul, and of human freedom.  He laments as he sees men exchanging the authority of a spiritual institution, like the Church, for the authority a carnal institution, like a bureaucracy.  He rages as he sees them abandoning charters that gave men rights, and accepting charters