'I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child, because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing, with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy's interest in politics, and never formed an opinion upon a political question until the breaking-out of the American Civil War when I was eighteen. I then sided strongly with the Union, as I showed at the Cambridge Union when I reached the University. Even in this question, however, I only followed my grandfather's lead, although, for the first time, in this case intelligently. So far indeed as character can be moulded in childhood, mine was fashioned by my grandfather Dilke.' It was not only character that Mr. Dilke formed. He made the boy the constant companion of his own intellectual pursuits, imbued him deeply with his own tastes, his own store of knowledge. In the summer of 1854 he had taken his pupil to 'Windsor, Canterbury, Rochester, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and many other interesting towns.' That autumn the pair went to France together--apparently the beginning of Charles Dilke's close acquaintance with that country, which was extended in the following year, 1855, when Wentworth Dilke was named one of the English Commissioners for the French International Exhibition, and took his family to live in Paris from April to August. 'We were all with him at Paris for some time, and I acquired a considerable knowledge of the antiquities of the town, before the changes associated with the name of Haussmann, by rambling about it with my grandfather, who, however, soon got sick of Paris and went home to his books, while we remained there for four months. I was at the party given at the Quai d'Orsay by Walewski, the son of Napoleon; at that given at the "Legion of Honour" by Flahaut, the father of Morny; at the Ball at the Hôtel de Ville to the Emperor and Empress and Queen Victoria; at the review; and at the Queen's entry and departure. The entry was the finest display of troops which I ever witnessed, as the National Guard of the City and its outskirts turned out in great form, and raised the numbers to 120,000, while the costumes both of the Guard and of the National Guard were very showy. There paraded also two hundred veterans of the wars of the First Empire in all the uniforms of the period. I heard Lablache in his last great part, and in this year I think I also saw Rachel for the last time; but I had seen her in England, I believe, in 1853. I certainly had seen her in a part in which many years later I remember Sarah Bernhardt, and can recall Rachel well enough to be able to institute a comparison entirely to Rachel's advantage.