The Life of the Rt Hon Sir Charles W. Dilke, vol 1 | Page 7

In
1849 he helped to establish Notes and Queries 'to be a paper in which
literary men could answer each other's questions'; and his contributions
to this paper [Footnote: Its founder and first editor, Mr. W. J. Thorns
(afterwards Librarian of the House of Lords), had for three years been
contributing to the Athenaeum columns headed "Folk-Lore"--a word
coined by him for the purpose. The correspondence which grew out of
this threatened to swamp other departments of the paper, and so the
project was formed of starting a journal entirely devoted to the subjects
which he had been treating. Mr. Dilke, being consulted, approved the
plan, and lent it his full support. In 1872, when Mr. Thorns retired from
control of the paper, Sir Charles Dilke bought it, putting in Dr. Doran
as editor; and thenceforward it was published from the same office as
the Athenaeum.] and to the Athenaeum never ceased; though so
unambitious of any personal repute was he that in all his long career he
never signed an article with his own name, nor identified himself with a
pseudonym. A man of letters, he loved learning and literature for their
own sake; yet stronger still than this love was his desire to transmit to
his heirs his own gathered knowledge, experience, and convictions.
He had become early 'an antiquary and a Radical,' and this combination
rightly indicated unusual breadth of sympathy. The period in which he
was born favoured it: for, keen student as he was of the eighteenth
century-- preserving in his own style, perhaps later than any other man
who wrote in England, that dignified but simple manner which Swift
and Bolingbroke had perfected--he yet was intimately in touch with the
young genius of an age in revolt against all the eighteenth-century
tradition. Keats, only a few years his junior, was his close friend; so
was John Hamilton Reynolds, the comrade of Keats, and author of
poems known to every student of that literary group. Thomas Hood and
Charles Lamb had long and near association with him. Lover of the old,
he had always an open heart for the new; and, bookish though he was,
no one could be less a bookworm. The antiquary in him never mastered
the Radical: he had an unflagging interest in the large facts of life, an
undying faith in human progress. Slighting his own lifework as he
evidently did--for he never spoke of it to his son or his son's son--he
was yet prompted by instinct to kindle and tend a torch which one after

him should carry, and perhaps should carry high. It would be difficult
to name any man who had a stronger sense of the family bond.
He had married very young--before he was nineteen--Maria Dover
Walker, the beautiful daughter of a Yorkshire yeoman, still younger
than he. This couple, who lived together "in a most complete
happiness" for forty years, had one child only, born in 1810, Charles
Wentworth Dilke, commonly called Wentworth. [Footnote: Papers of a
Critic, vol. i., p. 13.] Mr. Dilke sent his son to Westminster, and
removed him at the age of sixteen, arranging--because his theory of
education laid great stress on the advantage of travel--that the lad
should live for a while with Baron Kirkup, British Consul and
miniature painter, in Florence, as a preparatory discipline before going
to Cambridge. What he hoped and intended is notably expressed in a
letter written by him at Genoa on his return journey to his son in
Florence in 1826: [Footnote: Ibid., p. 18.]
"I ought to be in bed, but somehow you are always first in my thoughts
and last, and I prefer five minutes of gossiping with you.... How, indeed,
could it be otherwise than that you should be first and last in my
thoughts, who for so many years have occupied all my thoughts. For
fifteen years at least it has been my pleasure to watch over you, to
direct and to advise. Now, direct and personal interference has ceased....
It is natural, perhaps, that I should take a greater interest than other
fathers, for I have a greater interest at stake. I have _but one _son. That
son, too, I have brought up differently from others, and if he be not
better than others, it will be urged against me, not as a misfortune, but
as a shame. From the first hour I never taught you to believe what I did
not myself believe. I have been a thousand times censured for it, but I
had that confidence in truth that I dared put my faith in it and in you.
And you will not fail me. I am sure you will return home to do me
honour, and to make me respect you, as I do, and ever shall,