"English Essay Prize: Dilke.
Honourably mentioned: Osborn, Shee.
Latin Essay Prize: Warr.
Honourably mentioned: Casswell. [Footnote: A scholar of Sir Charles's
year, and one of his most frequent associates in undergraduate days.]
"They say that parts of my essay were vulgar.
"Your affectionate grandson,
"CHAS. W. DILKE."
That last sentence roused the old critic:
"I should like to read the whole essay. My especial interest is aroused by the charge of occasional vulgarity. If it be true, it is not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature and of life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is merely negative, and implies the absence of all character, and, in language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle. I have a notion—only do not whisper such heresy within college walls—that a college tutor must be genteel in his college judgments, that 'The Polite Letter Writer' was the work of an M.A. in the 'Augustan Age.' You may find in Shakespeare household words and phrases from every condition and walk in life—as much coarseness as you please to look for—anything and everything except gentility and vulgarity. Occasional vulgarity is, therefore, a question on which I refuse to take the opinion of any man not well known to me."
On one matter the pupil was recalcitrant. Mr. Dilke begged him to give "one hour or one half-hour a day" to mastering Greek, so as to be able to read it with pleasure—a mastery which could only be acquired "before you enter on the direct purpose and business of life." But "insuperable difficulties" presented themselves. "It is of considerable importance that I should be first in the college Law May examination." Hopes of compliance in a later period were held out, to which Mr. Dilke replied shrewdly that "insuperable difficulties" were often temperamental, and that during the whole period of study equally strong reasons for postponement would continue to present themselves; and then would come "the all-engrossing business of life, and there is an end of half-hours."
In May, 1864, Mr. Dilke was present on the bank at 'Grassy' when, on the second night of the races, Trinity Hall, with his grandson rowing at No. 3, went head of the river.
"The ever-memorable May 12th, 1864.