this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing,
with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy's interest in
politics, and never formed an opinion upon a political question until
the breaking-out of the American Civil War when I was eighteen. I then
sided strongly with the Union, as I showed at the Cambridge Union when
I reached the University. Even in this question, however, I only
followed my grandfather's lead, although, for the first time, in this
case intelligently. So far indeed as character can be moulded in
childhood, mine was fashioned by my grandfather Dilke.'

It was not only character that Mr. Dilke formed. He made the boy the
constant companion of his own intellectual pursuits, imbued him deeply
with his own tastes, his own store of knowledge. In the summer of 1854 he
had taken his pupil to 'Windsor, Canterbury, Rochester, Bury St. Edmunds,
St. Albans, and many other interesting towns.' That autumn the pair went
to France together--apparently the beginning of Charles Dilke's close
acquaintance with that country, which was extended in the following year,
1855, when Wentworth Dilke was named one of the English Commissioners for
the French International Exhibition, and took his family to live in Paris
from April to August.

'We were all with him at Paris for some time, and I acquired a
considerable knowledge of the antiquities of the town, before the
changes associated with the name of Haussmann, by rambling about it
with my grandfather, who, however, soon got sick of Paris and went
home to his books, while we remained there for four months. I was at
the party given at the Quai d'Orsay by Walewski, the son of Napoleon;
at that given at the "Legion of Honour" by Flahaut, the father of
Morny; at the Ball at the Hotel de Ville to the Emperor and Empress
and Queen Victoria; at the review; and at the Queen's entry and