Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/56

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EMINENT LIBERALS IN PARLIAMENT.

flunkies, and make even Liberal Ministers deliver themselves of " ti'aitorous, sugared speeches," enough to make Peter and Paul Wentworth turn in their coffins?

"Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
Oh! you and I have heard our fathers say
There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king."

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, M.P., is the eldest son of Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, first baronet, and grandson of Charles Wentworth Dilke, the celebrated critic, whose literary judgment and administrative talent were the chief stock in trade both of "The Athenaeum" and "The Daily New" in their younger days.

Sir Charles's father, as is well known, was much devoted to matters affecting art and industry, and was a leading promoter of the great Exhibition of 1851. As some acknowledgment of his eminent services, he was offered, and accepted, contrary to the advice of his father the critic, a baronetcy. The old gentleman was an inflexible Radical; and Sir Charles may be said, in all his mental and moral characteristics, to be the son of his grandfather rather than of his father. He was the preceptor and companion of Dilke's youth. He was an antiquary as well as a critic, and loved to trace the descent of grandson "Charley's" mother from the gentle and unselfish regicide Cawley as a noble pattern for her to set before her son.

The future member for Chelsea was born in the borough which he now represents in September, 1843. He is consequently in his thirty-seventh year. At the second of two private schools which he attended in the