HILAIRE BELLOC DEAD

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27094, 18 July 1953, Page 7

HILAIRE BELLOC DEAD

Historian, Essayist, And Poet

(Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, July 17. Mr Hilaire Belloc, a leading figure in English letters for more than 50 years, died yesterday at the age of 82. He had been critically ill since last Sunday, when he suffered severe burns from a fall into the fire at his home near Horsham, in Essex. Belloc for very many y ,ars was a firolific writer, and altogether he pubished about 150 books—some novels, many poems and essays, and much historical work. He was a staunch Roman Catholic, and a great lover of Continental Europe (he was half French), and his religious views shone through all his work. The son of a French barrister and an English mother, Belloc had a career of extraordinary distinction at Oxford.

Immediately after going down he entered politics and was a Liberal M.P. (for Salford) from 1906 until 1910. He found politics not to his liking (it was said that he was too impatient), and he devoted most of the rest of a remarkably active life to writing. Birthday Tributes At the time of his eightieth birthday, in 1950, Mr Belloc was paid many tributes in Britain. “The Times,” in a leading article which began: “The King’s English, which has had a lot to nut up with in late years, has no more loyal servant and master than Mr Hilaire Belloc,” said that in two generations he had “poured out a glorious succession of histories, essays, novels, poetry, and light verse.” “There can be few readers of discrimination who have not enjoyed Mr Belloc on something. They recall with a chuckle how, scorning to hedge his bets in the prudent style of most pundits, he traced confidently and not always accurately the fortunes over land and water of the First World War. They have by heart snatches from those unmatched cautionary sagas, for some of which he found in Basil Blackwood so perfect an illustrator. His polemical excursions into English history have stimulated without converting them. His accomplishment as a biographer has brought alive for them some of the famous dead. They are beguiled by the easy way jn which he turned his great weight of learning, his knowledge of men and places, and his strong and tender imagination to the delicate purposes of the essay. His sonnets and epigrams breathe the last enchantment of an art that, if it has not vanished, is in hiding. * “For all this wealth of literary output Mr Belloc deserves the thanks that are due to a man who has faithfully practised a great craft for more than half a century. He has walked the hills and sailed the seas of life and has loved old friends and old wines at each journey’s end. No living artist has toiled harder than Mr Belloc in the 80 and still happily unfinished years of his pilgrimage to Rome,” said “The Times.”