w an earlier royal head cut
off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built,
broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an
animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are
characters of fiction.

But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is
just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a
significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable
of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another
planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world.
Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a
time in centuries foreign to our own.

He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from
his preface will show how this adverb is justified:

As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the
critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor
failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining
truths.

Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in _The Two
Soldiers_) _did_ sail under Caesar for Britain from Boulogne, and
from no other port. There _was_ in those days a great land-locked
harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the
readers of the _Gaule Romaine_ must know. The moon _was_ at her
last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is
but fancy). There _was_ a high hill just at the place where she
would have been setting that night--you may see it to-day. The
Roman soldiers _were_ recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic
portions of Gaul; of the latter many _did_ know of that grotto
under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of
Europe. The tide _was_, as I have said, on the flow at
midnight--and so forth.

The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when
writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris
Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which
such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes
of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical
curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that
can reasonably be reconstructed.

Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly
that he makes i