rt_ skirt out of 81/2 yards of material, I
reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton
and Marie were married and had set about living happily ever after.

These two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which
cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing
it, they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was
full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it.
Gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study
as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products,
awakening youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box,
satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre.
His character, serene and humorous as his son describes him, is
reflected in his letters. Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental
powers in the family business. Taught by his father to be a good man
of business, he was in his private life a man of a thousand other
energies and ideas. "On the whole," says his son, "I am glad he was
never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an
amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He
could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things be
did so successfully."

Here, Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of
business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies
as superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father,
sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A
hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the
body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised
thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected
thing." Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and
modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic
lanterns and mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his
English literature backwards."

It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own
life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development
frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment.
But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when _pietas_
was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us
into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his
parents, to his home for all that they had given him.

I