admitted that "reading for a high place here involves loss of many
pleasures, of almost all society; it makes a man fretful, and often leaves
him behind the world; as an education for the mind it is not so good as
the self-education of a non-honours man ought to be, _but never is_." He
thought, nevertheless, that classics--of which he avowed himself "more
ignorant than an English gentleman ought to be"--offered the field in
which success was best worth having. He himself "would gladly be put back
to fourteen or fifteen, and 'grind my life out' till two-and-twenty, in
order to get a high place in the first-class classics." But it must be all
or nothing. A second-class he dismissed as not worth winning. Moreover,
"if the boy has not a high standard set up for him, he will do nothing
whatever, which is far worse than doing too much."

Meanwhile, in the midst of all that full college life which was becoming
more and more definitely a preparation for the political career, he was
trying his strength in the field of journalism.

His grandfather had never ceased to impress upon him that every public man
should have learned and practised thoroughly the craft of writing. This
precept allied itself with the inherited ownership of a great literary
journal; and very shortly after old Mr. Dilke's death the undergraduate,
as he then was, began to associate himself actively with the work of the
_Athenaeum_. His first published writing in it appeared on October 22nd,
1864, when he reviewed a well-known work on economics by the writer whom
the Memoir styles 'that dull Frenchman, Le Play.' [Footnote: French
Senator, son-in-law of the celebrated economist Michel Chevalier. He wrote
works on the principles of agriculture, the application of chemistry to
agriculture, and kindred subjects.] Le Play wrote from Paris to thank Sir
Wentworth Dilke for a copy of the article which had been sent him, and had
already attracted attention in France: