rooms were a continual focus
of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long
readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still
recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and
wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at
Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.

Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in
Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's.
It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western
Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.
But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her
into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her
wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and
the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene.
This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think
it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young
energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked
brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued
passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked
authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of
the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And,
partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the
most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a
tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without
assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite
of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any
reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.

Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:

"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college
friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the
ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone
with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate,
so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly
spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in
his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner
unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."

No one can leave those Balli