'It never seemed to occur to anyone that there were many persons who had been trained up in families republican in sentiment, and that it was possible that I should have never been anything but a republican without the trace of a "reason," and thought it honest to say so when I was charged with Republicanism as with some fearful crime. But to think and even to say that monarchy in Western Europe is a somewhat cumbersome fiction is not to declare oneself ready to fight against it on a barricade. It is only to protest against the silence of many being read into agreement with the fulsome nonsense that the majority talk about the personal loyalty of the country to the reigning House. My Republicanism was, however, with me a matter of education. My grandfather was a conservative republican in old age, a radical republican in youth, but a republican through life, and, as I have said before, my young ideas were my grandfather's ideas. It is a mistake to think that republican opinions in England died with Algernon Sidney, that Tom Paine was about the only English sympathizer with the French Revolution, and Shelley, Landor, and Swinburne only three mad poets. It is forgotten now that Burns subscribed to the funds of the French Republic, that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Moore all wrote republican odes to it, and that at the beginning of the century Southey and Brougham were republican, not to speak of Bentham and Godwin and other writers on whose books I had been brought up.' Sir Charles was not only denounced, but boycotted. [Footnote: Shirley Brooks of _Punch_ wrote in his diary, under date December 5th, 1871: "Macmillan asked me to dine, but as Sir C. Dilke, who has been spouting Republicanism, was to be one, I would not go, hating to dine with a man and abuse him in print, as I must do." (_Life, Letters, and Diaries of Shirley Brooks_, by G. S. Layard).] He seems for the moment to have had only two close friends available in London, Mr. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice. The former-- 'who had been deeply engaged in the anti-dowry agitation, although keeping himself in the background ... used to come every Sunday to go for walks with me; generally the two of us only, though on one of these occasions he brought Wilfrid Lawson, the wit of the public platforms, but a dismal man enough in private, [Footnote: Sir Charles's friendship with the great Temperance Reformer was cemented five years later by his adhesion to the Temperance ranks. 'February 4th, 1877, in Paris on my road I received a letter from Wilfrid Lawson, who had learnt that I had turned teetotaller. I was as a fact teetotaller for some eleven years, from 1874-1885. Lawson's letter was in verse with a chorus: "Coffee and tea, Coffee and tea, Those are the liquors for Lawson and me."