pital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his
academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old
volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an
hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk
about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.

Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of
Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest,
physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own
justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what
you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a
perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The
gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?

Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in
which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands
Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing
is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His
extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity
and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list
of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are
included.

Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that
he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find
the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights
in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then
look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us
"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its
literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of
'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."

III

In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds.
Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of
English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History,
politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires,
nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities
of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work
he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?)
It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of
anything, everything or nothing, th