The Life of the Rt Hon Sir Charles W. Dilke, vol 1 | Page 7

when Mr. Thorns retired from control of the paper, Sir Charles Dilke bought it, putting in Dr. Doran as editor; and thenceforward it was published from the same office as the Athenaeum.] and to the Athenaeum never ceased; though so unambitious of any personal repute was he that in all his long career he never signed an article with his own name, nor identified himself with a pseudonym. A man of letters, he loved learning and literature for their own sake; yet stronger still than this love was his desire to transmit to his heirs his own gathered knowledge, experience, and convictions.
He had become early 'an antiquary and a Radical,' and this combination rightly indicated unusual breadth of sympathy. The period in which he was born favoured it: for, keen student as he was of the eighteenth century-- preserving in his own style, perhaps later than any other man who wrote in England, that dignified but simple manner which Swift and Bolingbroke had perfected--he yet was intimately in touch with the young genius of an age in revolt against all the eighteenth-century tradition. Keats, only a few years his junior, was his close friend; so was John Hamilton Reynolds, the comrade of Keats, and author of poems known to every student of that literary group. Thomas Hood and Charles Lamb had long and near association with him. Lover of the old, he had always an open heart for the new; and, bookish though he was, no one could be less a bookworm. The antiquary in him never mastered the Radical: he had an unflagging interest in the large facts of life, an undying faith in human progress. Slighting his own lifework as he evidently did--for he never spoke of it to his son or his son's son--he was yet prompted by instinct to kindle and tend a torch which one after him should carry, and perhaps should carry high. It would be difficult to name any man who had a stronger sense of the family bond.
He had married very young--before he was nineteen--Maria Dover Walker, the beautiful daughter of a Yorkshire yeoman, still younger than he. This couple, who lived together "in a most complete happiness" for forty years, had one child only, born in 1810, Charles Wentworth Dilke, commonly called Wentworth. [Footnote: Papers of a Critic, vol. i., p. 13.] Mr. Dilke sent his son to Westminster, and removed him at the age of sixteen, arranging--because his theory of education laid great stress on the advantage of travel--that the lad should live for a while with Baron Kirkup, British Consul and miniature painter, in Florence, as a preparatory discipline before going to Cambridge. What he hoped and intended is notably expressed in a letter written by him at Genoa on his return journey to his son in Florence in 1826: [Footnote: Ibid., p. 18.]
"I ought to be in bed, but somehow you are always first in my thoughts and last, and I prefer five minutes of gossiping with you.... How, indeed, could it be otherwise than that you should be first and last in my thoughts, who for so many years have occupied all my thoughts. For fifteen years at least it has been my pleasure to watch over you, to direct and to advise. Now, direct and personal interference has ceased.... It is natural, perhaps, that I should take a greater interest than other fathers, for I have a greater interest at stake. I have _but one _son. That son, too, I have brought up differently from others, and if he be not better than others, it will be urged against me, not as a misfortune, but as a shame. From the first hour I never taught you to believe what I did not myself believe. I have been a thousand times censured for it, but I had that confidence in truth that I dared put my faith in it and in you. And you will not fail me. I am sure you will return home to do me honour, and to make me respect you, as I do, and ever shall, love you."
It was a singular letter for a man of thirty-seven to write--singular in its self-effacement before the rising generation, singular, too, in the intensity of its forecast. Yet, after all, a measure of disappointment was to be his return for that first venture. The son to whom so great a cargo of hopes had been committed was a vigorous lad, backed when he was fifteen 'to swim or shoot or throw against any boy of his age in England,' and he developed these and kindred energies, accepting culture only in so far as it ministered to his fine natural faculty for enjoyment. He acquired a knowledge of Italian and of operatic music at Florence; but