On Sunday evening, February 20th, Sir Charles dined with Mr. Alfred de
Rothschild to meet the Prince of Wales;
'but was more pleased with again meeting Lord Beaconsfield.'…
'After dinner I was next him. When he was offered a cigar, he said: "You English once had a great man who discovered tobacco, on which you English now live, and potatoes, on which your Irish live, and you cut off his head." This foreign point of view of Sir Walter Raleigh was extremely comical, I think.'
Finally there is this entry:
'Having made no note in my diary, I cannot tell if it was on Sunday, April 3rd, or on Sunday, March 27th, that Lord Barrington met Edmond Fitzmaurice and me in Curzon Street, where Lord Beaconsfield's house was, and said: "Come in and see him; he's ill, but would like to see you." He was on a couch in the back drawing-room, in which he died, I think, on April 19th. There was a bronchitis kettle on the hob, and his breathing was difficult, but he was still the old Disraeli, and, though I think that he knew that he was dying, yet his pleasant spitefulness about "Mr. G." was not abated. He meant to die game.'
Lord Beaconsfield made no secret of his liking for Sir Charles, but is said to have doubted the permanency of his Radicalism. "The sort of man who will die a Conservative peer," is said to have been his commentary after their first meeting, echoing an idea then widespread in the fashionable world, that of the two men so often compared, Sir Charles would gravitate towards the opinions of the Times, leaving his colleague 'to the unassisted championship of democratic rights.'
To the greatest of all European statesmen Dilke did not at this time become known; but Bismarck watched his career, and in the early part of this year, after the Prince of Wales's visit to Berlin,
'On March 16th Arthur Ellis, who had been with the Prince at Berlin, came to me from the Prince to say that the Prince had had much talk with Lord Ampthill (Odo Russell) about me. Our Ambassador was most anxious that I should visit Berlin, and thought that I could do much then with Bismarck, and usefully remove prejudices about myself at the Court. Ellis was the bearer of an invitation from the Embassy for me to stay there, and of a message that Bismarck much wished to make my acquaintance.'
There was no doubt as to the attractiveness of the invitation, but it was at once ruled out on public grounds.
'The visit, however, would give rise to much speculation in the Press, and would also make the Queen angry and Mr. Gladstone most uneasy. "But," I added in my diary, "if we want to stop the French from going to Tunis, there is a safe and easy way to do it—i.e., let me go to Berlin for one day and see Bismarck and talk about the weather, and then to Rome for one hour and see, no one, merely to let the fact get into the newspapers."'