It was through this phase of his activity that Charles Dilke took part in
the general life of the University. At the Union he was closely associated
with men outside his own college, one of whom, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice,
was destined to be a lifelong friend and fellow-worker. But his College
meant more to him than the University. A conservative in this, he
resented, and resisted later on, all tendencies to make the teaching of
the place communal by an opening of college lectures to students from
other colleges; he valued the distinctiveness of type which went with the
older usage, under which he himself was nurtured. Trinity Hall was a
lawyers' college; it had a library specially stored with law books, and it
was early determined that he should conform to the _genius loci_ so far at
least as to be called to the Bar. In his first Christmas vacation he began
to eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, where his nomination paper was
signed by John Forster; and in June, 1863, after he had spent a year at
mathematics and won his college scholarship, he took stock of his
position, and felt clear as to his own powers. He might, he thought,
attain to about a tenth wranglership in the Mathematical Tripos, which
would insure him a fellowship at his college; but this, although he valued
academic distinctions very highly, did not seem an end worth two years of
work, and he determined to devote the remainder of his time at the
University to the study of law and history.

He had not at any time limited himself to mathematics. Both before his
freshman year and during it he had read hard and deeply on general
subjects. His habit was to analyze on paper whatever he studied, and he
had dealt thus in 1861 (aged eighteen) with all Sir Thomas More,
Bolingbroke, and Hobbes. Among the papers for 1862 there is preserved such
an analysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the
Abbe Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the association of
ideas, and the originality of the anti-selfish affections. These are