explain.  I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a ‘brat.’  In those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable.  His rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole school career.”

In ’89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul.  Here he revived the Gallic heritage which 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 I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy.  It is the perpetual fate of that book—­everyone should have six copies.

After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford—­admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in England.  He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the “characters” of the college.  There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing:  he was the Roman candle of the 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 the fire and fury of his historical study.  His rooms were a continual focus of noise:  troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long readings from Rabelais.  And probably his battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol.  Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.

Balliol is not beautiful:  more than any other of the older colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the “restorations” of the 70’s and 80’s.  It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.  But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, 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