SOURCE: "Hilaire Belloc as Poet," in The Bookman, Vol. LXXIX, No. 469, October, 1930, pp. 22-3.

In the following essay, Pennington provides a positive assessment of Belloc's verse.

A critic has recently reminded us that Mr. Belloc has just turned sixty. A good age, and well employed, when we consider the fruits of Mr. Belloc's thirty-five years of writing. For no man surely can look back with more pride upon work that has always been honest and well done, loyal to a constant ideal, courageous and sincere, and not infrequently of a high degree of beauty. This was a happy reminder of an anniversary if it sends a few more readers to a good writer and a clear thinker, and a man who, though in a few things wide of the mark and partisan, is yet worth a dozen of his more popular contemporaries.

To speak of Mr. Belloc here...