The brilliant girl's desire to take all knowledge for her kingdom had been intensified by her marriage at twenty-one to the scholar more than twice her age. In the words of Sir Charles's Memoir: 'She widened her conception of art by the teaching of the philosopher and by the study of the literatures to which the schooling of Mark Pattison admitted her. She saw, too, men and things, travelled largely with him, became mistress of many tongues, and gained above all a breadth of desire for human knowledge, destined only to grow with the advance of years.' [Footnote: _The Book of the Spiritual Life_, by the late Lady Dilke, with a Memoir of the Author by Sir Charles W. Dilke, p. 18.] At twenty-five years of age she was contributing philosophical articles to the _Westminster Review_, and for years she wrote the review of foreign politics for the _Annual Register_. Later she furnished art criticisms to the _Portfolio_, the _Saturday Review_, and the _Academy_, of which last she was art editor. It was as an art critic that she had come to be known, and to this work she brought a remarkable equipment; for to her technical knowledge and artist's training was added a deep study of the tendencies of history and of human thought. _Art in the Modern State_, in which she wrote of the art of the 'Grand Siècle' in its bearing on modern political and social organizations, has been quoted as the book most characteristic of the philosophical tendency of her writing, but this did not appear till 1888. The _Renaissance of Art in France_, which had been published in 1879, was illustrated by drawings from her own pencil, and in 1884 had appeared _Claude Lorrain_, written by herself in the pure and graceful French of which she was mistress. She had been a pupil of Mulready, whose portrait still decorates the mantelpiece of her Pyrford home, and in the early South Kensington days had come much under the influence of Watts and Ruskin. There were numbered among her friends many who had achieved distinction in the art, literature, or politics of Europe. Her letters on art to Eugène Müntz, preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale, commemorate the friendship and assistance given to her by the author of the _History of the Italian Renaissance_, whose admiration for her work made him persuade her to undertake her _Claude_. It was Taine who bore witness to her 'veritable erudition on the fine arts of the Renaissance,' when in 1871, lecturing in Oxford, he used to visit Mark Pattison and his young wife at Lincoln College, and described the 'toute jeune femme, charmante, gracieuse, à visage frais et presque mutin, dans le plus joli nid de vieille architecture, avec lierre et grands arbres.' [Footnote: 'The Art Work of Lady Dilke,' _Quarterly Review_, October, 1906.] It was Renan, a friend of later years, whom as yet she did not know, who 'presented' her _Renaissance_ to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.