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.]