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