Dilke was elected to the Library Committee of the Union in his second term, and in his third to the Standing Committee. At this moment a decision was taken to make a determined effort for new buildings, and it was suggested that he should stand for the secretaryship. Declining this as likely to engross more time than he could spare, he was put forward for the Vice-Presidency, and elected at the beginning of October, 1863. His prominence in the negotiations which followed may be inferred from the fact that he was re-elected. This was in itself a rare honour; but in his case was followed by election and re-election to the Presidency, a record unique in the Society's annals. It was through this phase of his activity that Charles Dilke took part in the general life of the University. At the Union he was closely associated with men outside his own college, one of whom, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, was destined to be a lifelong friend and fellow-worker. But his College meant more to him than the University. A conservative in this, he resented, and resisted later on, all tendencies to make the teaching of the place communal by an opening of college lectures to students from other colleges; he valued the distinctiveness of type which went with the older usage, under which he himself was nurtured. Trinity Hall was a lawyers' college; it had a library specially stored with law books, and it was early determined that he should conform to the _genius loci_ so far at least as to be called to the Bar. In his first Christmas vacation he began to eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, where his nomination paper was signed by John Forster; and in June, 1863, after he had spent a year at mathematics and won his college scholarship, he took stock of his position, and felt clear as to his own powers. He might, he thought, attain to about a tenth wranglership in the Mathematical Tripos, which would insure him a fellowship at his college; but this, although he valued academic distinctions very highly, did not seem an end worth two years of work, and he determined to devote the remainder of his time at the University to the study of law and history. He had not at any time limited himself to mathematics. Both before his freshman year and during it he had read hard and deeply on general subjects. His habit was to analyze on paper whatever he studied, and he had dealt thus in 1861 (aged eighteen) with all Sir Thomas More, Bolingbroke, and Hobbes. Among the papers for 1862 there is preserved such an analysis of Coleridge's political system; a note on the views of the Abbé Morellet, with essays on comparative psychology, the association of ideas, and the originality of the anti-selfish affections. These are deposits of that course of philosophic reading over which, says the Memoir, 'I wasted a good deal of time in 1862, but managed also to give myself much mental training.'