the company of his family, and, above all, of his grandfather. Then he
went back to Cambridge, and lived the life of strenuous, healthy young men
in the summer weather; getting up at five o'clock in the mornings,
bathing, reading long hours, walking long walks, talking the long talks of
youth. The correspondence with his grandfather centred chiefly now on the
subject for the next year's essay competition, which had been announced at
the close of the May term, and which, as Charles Dilke said, "seems to be
rather in my line."

It was Pope's couplet:

"For forms of government let fools contest,
Whatever is best administered is best."

It was no less in old Mr. Dilke's line than in his grandson's. He wrote on
July 14th from Alice Holt a page of admirable criticism on the scheme as
outlined by his grandson, and concludes in his habitual tone of
affectionate self-depreciation:

"This is another of my old prosings--another proof that love and good
will and good wishes remain when power to serve is gone...."

With the precocious maturity of Charles Dilke's intellect had gone a
slowness of development in other directions. It is true that those
Cambridge men who remember him as an undergraduate remember him as
serious, but full of high animal spirits and sense of fun; while everyone
speaks of his charm and gaiety. "We were all in love with him," says one
vivacious old lady, who belonged to the circle of connections and
relatives that frequented 76, Sloane Street. But the letters of his early
days at Cambridge hardly show that 'happiness of manner' which his