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.

[* See Appendix A.]

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