Age of my fathers: truer at the touch Than mine: Great age of Dickens, youth and yule: Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch, I might have deemed man had no need of rule, But I was born when petty poets pule, When madmen used your liberty to mix Lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful, I was not born in 1856.*
[* Quoted in _G. K. Chesterton: A criticism_. Aliston Rivers (1908) pp. 243-244.]
Both _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ are worth reading.* They breathe the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not quote them in his _Autobiography_, but, just mentioning Captain Chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in Kensington. (For, the family fortunes having been dissipated, Gilbert's great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house agent.) A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the _Autobiography_ of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business was honourable and important.
The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history, were by now established in that English middle-class respectability in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder what young house-agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earnest co-operation."
Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three children. The family had long been English, but came originally from French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."
*