maginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself.
Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of
their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life.
Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you
think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is
not likely to give way to this temptation.

But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the
reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past
civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the
_poeta_ (or poet) entered the _domus_ (or house), kicked the _canis_ (or
dog) and summoned the _servus_ (or slave)." It will be at all events a
living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an
accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language
and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own
times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into
the _opera-bouffe_ of, for example, Mr. Shaw's _Caesar and Cleopatra_.
There will also be no tushery.

The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is
cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the
particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of
eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great
steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the
effects he here desires to convey.

It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even
and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other
societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs
of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious,
over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.

Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which
describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:

When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and
ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to
several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things,
but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about
them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern
of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In
great established wealth and lineage lay all that was le