Mr. Chesterton has spoken of Mr. Belloc as one who “did and does humanly and heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure, and almost an indulgence.”  And The Four Men expresses this love humorously, inconsequently, and with a grave stepping eloquence.  There are few speeches in modern books better than the conversations in The Four Men. Mr. Belloc is not one of those disciples of realism who believe that the art of conversation is dead, and that modern people are only capable of addressing each other in one-line sentences.  He has the traditional love of the fine speech such as we find it in the ancient poets and historians and dramatists and satirists.  He loves a monologue that passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdote and history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of things seen and half an irresponsible imagination.  He can describe a runaway horse with the farcical realism of the authors of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steep a landscape in vision.  Two recent critics have described him as “the best English prose writer since Dryden,” but that only means that Mr. Belloc’s rush of genius has quite naturally swept them off their feet.

If Mr. Belloc’s love of country is an indulgence, his moods of suspicion and contempt are something of the same kind.  He is nothing of a philanthropist in any sense of the word.  He has no illusions about the virtue of the human race.  He takes pleasure in scorn, and there is a flavour of bitterness in his jests.  His fiction largely belongs to the comedy of corruption.  He enjoys—­and so do we—­the thought of the poet in Sussex who had no money except three shillings, “and a French penny, which last some one had given him out of charity, taking him for a beggar a little way-out of Brightling that very day.”  When he describes the popular rejoicings at the result of Mr. Clutterbuck’s election, he comments:  “The populace were wild with joy at their victory, and that portion of them who as bitterly mourned defeat would have been roughly handled had they not numbered quite half this vast assembly of human beings.”  He is satirist and ironist even more than historian.  His ironical essays are the best of their kind that have been written in recent years.

Mr. Mandell and Mr. Shanks in their little study, Hilaire Belloc:  the Man and his Work, are more successful in their exposition of Mr. Belloc’s theory of history and the theory of politics which has risen out of it—­or out of which it has risen—­than they are in their definition of him as a man of letters.  They have written a lively book on him, but they do not sufficiently communicate an impression of the kind of his exuberance, of his thrusting intellectual ardour, of his pomp as a narrator, of his blind and doctrinaire injustices, of his jesting like a Roman Emperor’s, of the strength of his happiness upon a journey, of his buckishness,