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The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1 by Stephen Lucius Gwynn
page 82 of 719 (11%)
"Sir P. Sidney: _Arcadia_.
"Claude Adrien Helvetius: _Works_.
"Victor Hugo: _Les Miserables_.
"William Godwin: _Political Justice_."

He notes also in the Memoir that the reading of Mill at this period marked
the beginning of Mill's influence over him. This influence was a great
factor in Dilke's life, and, when it passed into a personal relation,
became almost one of discipleship.

His taste for Victor Hugo led him to write in the _Athenaeum_ a long
notice of _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ in 1866, when that romance
appeared; but another article about the same period on international law
indicates the main bent of his studies.

As early as the Long Vacation of 1864, in the course of preparing his
essay on forms of government, he had found himself tracing 'the future of
the Anglo-Saxon race both in the United States and Australasia'; and he
thus, without knowing it, laid the foundation lines of _Greater Britain_.
Also, in 1865, 'I had already dreamt of visiting and writing upon Russia,
a country which always had a great hold on my imagination.' Another
project of these undergraduate years was less his own than his
grandfather's. Old Mr. Dilke contemplated a universal catalogue of books,
to be prepared by international action. This scheme was completely
abandoned, yet it is interesting that the grandson entertained it. The
scholar, not merely the lover, but the active servant, of learning, was
always present in Charles Dilke's many-sided personality, though never
dominant. We approach the central preoccupations of his mind with the
_History of Prevalent Opinions in Politics_, towards which 'a great deal
of work' was done by him in the winter of 1864-65. In 1866 the same
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