re even their own
country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is
delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They
feel a meaning in it: it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it
explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has
arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is
the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest
and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest
pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of
our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before
we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day;
they seek their food and their drinking-places and, as I believe,
their assemblies, by known ways which they have made.

All travel is a pilgrimage, more or less exalted, and a Catholic with a
mind of Mr. Belloc's type makes the performance of such an act both a
religious ceremonial and a personal pleasure. He feels it to be no less
an act of religion because it is full of jolly human and coloured
experience.

Out of this conception he has developed a new and personal form of the
Fantastic or Unbridled Book of Travels: much as Heine's form of the same
thing developed from a faint reflection of a half-remembered tradition
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's praise of nature. It is odd to compare the
two, Mr. Belloc on pilgrimage for his religion of normality and good
fellowship, Heine walking in honour of the religion of wit.

The comparison indeed is inevitable: for these men, each solid, sensible
and humorous, each availing himself of the same form of literature, each
standing apart from the windiness of such as George Borrow, are as alike
in method as they are distinct in spirit. The form, the method indeed,
are admirable for men of the type of these two who resemble one another
so much in general cast, in line of action, though so very little in
thought.

It is a form, as it were, made for a man of various tastes and talents,
for the progress of his journey makes a frame-work suggesting and
holding together a multitude of discursions. An event of the day's march
can set him off on a train of entertaining or profitable reflection and
Mr. Belloc, in the earlier of the two books which are the subject of
this disquisition, will abruptly introduce an irrelevant story as he
explains, to while away the tedium