"The value of Lepanto"

'Don Juan of Austria has gone by Alcalar.'

"That is from Lepanto, and it is a trumpet call! But indeed the whole of that poem Lepanto is not only the summit of Chesterton's achievement in verse but the summit of high rhetorical verse in all our generation. I have said this so often that I am almost tired of saying it again, but I must continue to say it. People who cannot see the value of Lepanto are half dead. Let them so remain."

~Hilaire Belloc: On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters.

Lepanto by Chesterton

OCTOBER

LOOK, how those steep woods on the mountain's face 
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold 
Invades our very noon: the year's grown old, 
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace. 
The vines below have lost their purple grace, 
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled, 
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold, 
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry, 
Tired limbs I'll stretch and steaming beast I'll tether; 
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free, 
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather; 
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we, 
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

~Hilaire Belloc

Early October in the Pyrenees

"The young will not take advice"

"The old complain that the young will not take advice. But the wisest will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young, and the reality can come only with years."

~Hilaire Belloc: Reality

See the complete essay here

September

I, from a window where the Meuse is wide,
Looked eastward out to the September night;
The men that in the hopeless battle died
Rose, and deployed, and stationed for the fight;
A brumal army, vague and ordered large
For mile on mile by some pale general,–
I saw them lean by companies to the charge,
But no man living heard the bugle-call.

And fading still, and pointing to their scars,
They fled in lessening clouds, where gray and high
Dawn lay along the heaven in misty bars;
But watching from that eastern casement, I
Saw the Republic splendid in the sky,
And round her terrible head the morning stars.

~Hilaire Belloc

"Heretics all"

Heretics all, whoever you may be,

In Tarbes or Nîmes, or over the sea,

You never shall have good words from me.

Caritas non conturbat me.

But Catholic men that live upon wine

Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;

Wherever I travel I find it so.

Benedicamus Domino.

~Hilaire Belloc: in The Path to Rome

On Gilbert Chesterton

"ALL men one may say, or very nearly all men, have one leading moral defect.  Few have one leading Christian virtue. That of Gilbert Chesterton was unmistakably the virtue of Christian charity:  a virtue especially rare in writing men, and rarest of all in such of them as have a pursuing appetite for controversy—that is, for bolting out the truth."

~Hilaire Belloc: On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters.

(See the complete essay here)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

AUGUST

The soldier month, the bulwark of the year, 
That never more shall hear such victories told; 
He stands apparent with his heaven-high spear, 
And helmeted of grand Etruscan gold. 
Our harvest is the bounty he has won, 
The loot his fiery temper takes by strength. 
Oh! Paladin of the Imperial sun! 
Oh! crown of all the seasons come at length! 

This is sheer manhood; this is Charlemagne, 
When he with his wide host came conquering home 
From vengeance under Roncesvalles ta'en. 
Or when his bramble beard flaked red with foam 
Of bivouac wine-cups on the Lombard plain, 
What time he swept to grasp the world at Rome.

~Hilaire Belloc

Emperor Charlemagne, by Albrecht Dϋrer.
Oil on lindenwood, c. 1512;
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.