brother. I had few child friends, and used to see more of grown-up
people, such as Chorley, [Footnote: Musical critic for the
_Athenaeum._] Thackeray, and Dickens, of whom the latter was known to
us as "young Charles Dickens," owing to my great-grandfather having
known "Micawber."'

Old Mr. Dilke's father had been employed in the Admiralty along with the
father of Dickens. As for Thackeray, it was probably about this time that
he came on the boy stretched out upon grass in the garden of Gore House,
resting on elbows, deep in a book, and looked over his shoulder. "Is it
any good?" he asked. "Rather!" said the boy. "Lend it me," said Thackeray.
The book was _The Three Musketeers_, and we all know _The Roundabout
Papers_ which came out of that loan.

Charles Dilke had his free run of novels as a boy, and not of novels only.
In 1854, when he was only eleven:

'I began my regular theatre-going, which became a passion with me for
many years, and burnt itself out, I may add, like most passions, for I
almost entirely ceased to go near a theatre when I went to Cambridge
at nineteen. Charles Kean, and Madame Vestris, and Charles Mathews,
were my delight, with Wright and Paul Bedford at the Adelphi, Webster
and Buckstone at the Haymarket, and Mrs. Keeley. Phelps came later,
but Charles Kean's Shakespearian revivals at the Princess's from the
first had no more regular attendant. My earliest theatrical
recollection is Rachel.

'I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child,
because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to
read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during