of a dull road. And at the end of the
irrelevance, the purpose of travel restores him to the path and
preserves the unity of the book.

_The Path to Rome_, though perhaps better known, is a younger and a less
mature book than _The Four Men_. It is brilliantly full of humour and
poetic description: it has even remarkable stretches of Fine Writing.
One could deduce from it without much difficulty the general trend of
Mr. Belloc's mind, for he has tumbled into it pell-mell all his first
thoughts and reflections. With the fixed basis of thought, on which we
have already so often insisted, he will think at all times and on all
things in the same general way. This gives his observations a uniform
character and a uniform interest. The pleasure in reading a book of this
sort is to see how his method of thinking will play upon the various
hares of subjects that he starts.

This basis of thought in him is continuous: it has not changed, but it
has ripened, and it is more fully expressed. _The Path to Rome_ is the
book of a young man, vigorous, exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it
were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. _The Four Men_,
which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature,
is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is
also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent.

It is, in all its ramifications, a lyric, the expression of a single
idea or emotion, and that the love of one's own country. The cult of
Sussex, as it has been harshly and awkwardly called, makes a sort of
nucleus to Mr. Belloc's examination and impression of the world. If he
knows Western Europe tolerably well, he knows this one county perfectly,
and from it his explorations go out in concentric circles. He finds it,
as he found with The Road, a solemn, a ritual, and a pleasurable task to
praise his own home.

We cannot here analyse this book in any detail, nor would its framework
bear so pedantic an insistence. The writer describes how, sitting in an
inn just within the Kentish borders of Sussex he determined to walk
across the county, admiring it by the way, and so to find his own home.
He is joined on the road by three companions, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor,
and the Poet. It would be stupid, the act of a Prussian professor, to
seek for allegories in these figures, who are described and moulded with
a quite human humour. The supernatural touch given to them in the last
pages of the book,