But this was only an excursion. The whole bent of his desire lay towards serious travel, in which he should pass from the training- ground of the University to that wider school where knowledge was to be gained, applied, and perfected. In the early part of 1866 he was talking only of a journey in America, and it was a journey with a literary purpose. In his _History of Radicalism_ he had given much space to the Revivals in Prussia led by Ebel, and also to the rise in America of the school of the Perfectionists in 1834. He proposed to take with him the sketch of this book, and work into it the results of inquiry made on the spot as regards the communistic experiments which had been tried in the United States. But travel for its own sake tempted him, and even before he set out, 'I fancy,' he writes, 'my intention was already to go round the world: but if I had asked my father's leave to do so, I should have been refused.' At all events, when once fairly launched, the interest of travelling absorbed his mind; and accordingly the book on Radicalism was finally put aside, though not before some work had been done on it at Quebec and Ottawa. Nor was it altogether abandoned; for, he says, in treating of 'Radicalism in modern history': 'I discussed it under various heads, of which the first was Great Britain, the second the British Colonies, the third the United States, showing, as this table was made before I left England, the predominance which Colonial questions were already assuming in my mind.' Also: 'In the last part of the sketch of the work I dealt with the political Radicalism of the future. I wrote strongly in favour of the removal of the disabilities of sex. I took the Irish Catholic view of the Irish question, and I commenced the discussion of some of those questions which made the freshness and the success of _Greater Britain_--for example, "Effects upon Radicalism of Increased Facility of Communication," and "Development of the Principle of Love of Country into that of Love of Man."' 'Such,' he writes, at the end of that passage which describes the purposes and the labours of his last academic terms--'such were the dispositions in which I commenced my journey round the world.' CHAPTER VI "GREATER BRITAIN" In June, 1866, Charles Dilke, not yet twenty-three, started on the travels which are recorded in the first and most popular of his books, _Greater Britain_. Its original draft was in reality the numbered series of long descriptive letters which he sent home to Sloane Street. His first prolonged absence, coupled with the unspent shock of his grandfather's death, had bred in him a homesickness, which under the influence of a Virginian summer he tried to dissipate by an outburst of verse; but the medium was unsuited to his pen, and he soon returned to the 'dispositions' with which he started on his journey.