A Splendid Man Most well-known figures seem to dwindle in
old age. Mr. Belloc, now critically ill at 83, bulks in the mind as large as ever. He is, for the time being, the last of the giants, a generous, chivalric figure, compact of integrity, seasoned with prejudice, crested with panache. For sheer stature I cannot think of any living writer who begins to measure up to him. On Tuesday night, after the news of his danger was known, I found myself at a dinner-table with Sir Harold Nicolson, Mr. John Betjeman and Mr. Rupert Hart-Davis, and I am sure it would have given Mr. Belloc pleasure if he could have heard the fluency with which not merely his published but his unpublished poems were quoted by the yard. The latter, I suppose, may one day see the light; but Mr. Belloc was a good hater and a master of the lost art of invective, and some of them might still, today, offend dynastic susceptibilities, in the City and elsewhere. The fashionable epithet, Elizabethan, sits on some of the people and things it is applied to a little incongruously, like a top hat on a savage or an admiral on a horse; it would fit Mr. Belloc admirably. •
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