The boy was his grandfather's to educate, and there has not often been such an education. A man ripe in years, still vigorous--for Mr. Dilke was only fifty-three when his elder grandson was born--yet retired from the business of life, and full of leisure, full of charm, full of experience, full of knowledge, devoted his remaining years to the education of his grandson. It may be held that he created a forcing-house of feeling, no less than of knowledge, under which the boy's nature was prematurely drawn up; but there can be no doubt as to the efficacy of the method. It was not coddling--Mr. Dilke was too shrewd for that--and if at a certain stage it seemed as though excessive stimulus had been given, maturity went far to contradict that impression. 'After my mother's death I began classics and mathematics with Mr. Bickmore, at that time a Chelsea curate and afterwards Vicar of Kenilworth. At the same time I took charge of teaching letters to my brother. I had few child friends, and used to see more of grown-up people, such as Chorley, [Footnote: Musical critic for the _Athenaeum._] Thackeray, and Dickens, of whom the latter was known to us as "young Charles Dickens," owing to my great-grandfather having known "Micawber."' Old Mr. Dilke's father had been employed in the Admiralty along with the father of Dickens. As for Thackeray, it was probably about this time that he came on the boy stretched out upon grass in the garden of Gore House, resting on elbows, deep in a book, and looked over his shoulder. "Is it any good?" he asked. "Rather!" said the boy. "Lend it me," said Thackeray. The book was _The Three Musketeers_, and we all know _The Roundabout Papers_ which came out of that loan. Charles Dilke had his free run of novels as a boy, and not of novels only. In 1854, when he was only eleven: 'I began my regular theatre-going, which became a passion with me for many years, and burnt itself out, I may add, like most passions, for I almost entirely ceased to go near a theatre when I went to Cambridge at nineteen. Charles Kean, and Madame Vestris, and Charles Mathews, were my delight, with Wright and Paul Bedford at the Adelphi, Webster and Buckstone at the Haymarket, and Mrs. Keeley. Phelps came later, but Charles Kean's Shakespearian revivals at the Princess's from the first had no more regular attendant. My earliest theatrical recollection is Rachel.