their belief by doctrine and example; and both, with great diversity of
gifts, had the rough strong directness of intellectual attack which
Cambridge, then perhaps more than at any other time, set in contrast to
the subtleties of Oxford culture.

Leslie Stephen in particular, who had been a tutor and who was still a
clerical Fellow, made it his business to meet undergraduates on their own
ground. Hard work and hard bodily exercise--but, above all, hard bodily
exercise--made up the gospel which he preached by example. No one ever did
more to develop the cult of athletics, and there is no doubt that he
thought these ideals the best antidote to drunkenness and other vices,
which were far more rife in the University of that day than of this.

Both he and Fawcett were strenuous Radicals, and contact with them was
well fitted to infuse fresh vitality into the political beliefs which
Charles Dilke had assumed by inheritance from his grandfather. In these
ways of thought he met them on ground already familiar and attractive to
him. His introduction to Fawcett was at the Economics and Statistics
Section of the British Association, which he attended at Cambridge in the
first week of his first term. "I am one of the few people who really enjoy
statistics," he said, long years after this, in a presidential address to
the Statistical Society. But it was early at nineteen to develop this
exceptional taste.

In another domain of modern thought these elder men affected his mind
considerably and with a new order of ideas. Old Mr. Dilke seems to have
left theology out of his purview altogether; and it was at Cambridge that
Charles Dilke first met the current of definitely sceptical thought on
religious matters.