al
Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles
Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we
all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.

George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography,
the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for
reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of
Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their
overthrow. Darwin was writing his _Origin of Species_, which in some
curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they
seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and
have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made
divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that
made them so.

When by an odd confusion the _Tribune_ described G. K. Chesterton as
having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his
books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:

I am not fond of anthropoids as such,
I never went to Mr. Darwin's school,
Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much
Leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool.
I cannot say my heart with hope is full
Because a donkey, by continual kicks,
Turns slowly into something like a mule--
I was not born in 1856.

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