the faint mystic flavour which clings to them from
the beginning and marks them as being just more than companions of
flesh, these things are indicated with so delicate a hand, so
reticently, that to analyse the method would be destruction--for the
writers at least.

The book should be, by rights, described as "an extraordinary medley."
As a matter of fact, it is not. Mr. Belloc gives it, as sub-title, the
description "A Farrago," but we are not very clear what that means. It
contains all manner of stuff from an excellent drinking song, an
excellent marching song (which has now seen service), and a first-rate
song about religion to the story of St. Dunstan and the Devil and an
account of Mr. Justice Honeybubbe's Decision. But all this is strung
together with such a curious tact on the string of the journey across
Sussex that the miscellaneous materials make one coherent composition.

The recurrent landscapes which mark the progress of that journey are
slight but exquisite. Take this one example, describing the gap of
Arundel, just below Amberley:

... The rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to
such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add
to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together
were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder.
At this place the flat water-meadows, the same that are flooded
and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch out a sort of scene or
stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one
looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of
Rockham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines,
the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which
flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the
Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the
foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made
than when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for
which the whole County of Sussex was made and the ornament worthy
of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat,
where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the
hills of home.

These pages are full of sentences, graciously praising Sussex, in
themselves small and perfect poems, as for example the praises of Arun,
"which, when a man bathes in it, makes him