Reminiscent of earlier family friendships were the Keats relics here and in Sir Charles's own study. Many of these had been bought by old Mr. Dilke from Keats's love, Fanny Brawne, to save them from the indignity of an auction.
In the Blue Room also hung some extraordinarily fine pictures by Blake, who was the friend of Sir Charles's grandfather—among them 'The Crucifixion,' 'The Blasphemer,' and 'The Devil,' [Footnote: 'I gave four of my Blakes to the South Kensington Museum in 1884.'] The best loved both by the grandfather and by Sir Charles was the beautiful 'Queen Catherine's Dream.' A precious copy of The Songs of Innocence, hand-painted by Blake and his wife, completed the collection. There were several reliefs by Dalou in the house, the finest let in over the mantelpiece of the Blue Room, a copy of Flaxman's Mercury and Pandora. They were executed for Sir Charles when the sculptor was in London in great distress after the Commune, before the amnesty which retrieved his fortunes.
Here also were reminiscences of Provence. One side of the wall was largely covered by a picture of Fréjus by Wislin, painted in the days when St. Raphael and Valescure did not exist, and when the old town rose clear from the low ground as Rome rises from the Campagna, the beautiful Roquebrune, a spur of Sir Charles's beloved Mountains of the Moors, behind it. Sèvres china, vases, bronzes, filled the window ledges, presents to the first Baronet from the Emperor of Austria, Napoleon III., the Crown Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor Frederick), and other royal persons and Governments, with whom his Exhibition work brought him into touch.
At the time when Horace Walpole's collection at Strawberry Hill was sold, Sir Charles's grandfather had stayed at Twickenham, and had brought away many purchases, which peopled the Red and Green Drawing-rooms on the next landing. There was a little group of miniatures in which the 'Beautiful Gunnings' and a charming 'Miss Temple' figured; in another group, miniatures of Addison, of Mme. Le Brun, of Molière, came from Lady Morgan, whose pen of bog-oak and gold, a gift to her from the Irish people, hung in Sir Charles's own study. The best of the miniatures were those by Peter Oliver, and portrayed Frederick of Bohemia, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth, Princess Royal of England, afterwards married to Lord Craven; while the finest of all was 'a son of Sir Kenelm Digby, 1632.' It was one of 'several others' which Walpole 'purchased at a great price,' a purchase which was thus chronicled 'by Mason (Junius) in a letter to Walpole: 'I congratulate you on the new miniatures, though I know one day they will become Court property and dangle under the crimson-coloured shop-glasses of our gracious Queen Charlotte.' The set were all brought together for the first time since 1842 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition.
In these two drawing-rooms, among the medley of enamelled and inlaid tables, royal gifts and collectors' purchases, pictures by Cranach, Mabuse, Van Goyen, Mignard, and many more, some special objects stood out. These were a beautiful Madonna by Memling, on a circular panel, from Lord Northwick's collection; the Strawberry Hill marble version of the famous Bargello relief by Donatello, of the head of the infant St. John the Baptist; and a portrait ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, which, owing to the fleurs-de-lis on the chair, passed by the name of 'the Duchess,' a portly lady of some dignity, with beautiful white hands and tapering fingers. Lady Dilke's researches, however, placed the lady as Anne Dujardin, an innkeeper of Lyons. The painter, young Karl Dujardin, unable to pay his reckoning, had settled it by marrying his hostess and taking her to Amsterdam, and the fleurs-de-lis on the chair explained that the lady was of French extraction. A Flemish head of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had come from the Gwydyr Collection. She was much exhibited, but her main interest was due to Sir Charles's intense admiration for the governing capacity and the overshadowed life of the woman. He made two pilgrimages to the church at Brou, near Bourg-en-Bresse, where her sculptured face, closely resembling that of the portrait, looks out from tomb and windows, as she lies side by side with Philibert le Beau, the husband of her love and of her youth, in the magnificent shrine she built for him.
Tapestry hangings divided the rooms from each other, and in many cases only heavy curtains divided them from the stairs.
Above these rooms, Sir Charles's little study, occupied all day by his secretary or himself, was lined with books of reference and piles of despatch-boxes, while every spare foot on the wall held relics of the past. There was the Herkomer portrait of his second wife, there also a copy of a favourite picture, Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredano; the portrait of Keats, the only one Severn did from the life—now on loan at the National Portrait Gallery—old political cartoons of Chelsea days, portraits and prints of John Wilkes, and a head of Mazzini. Felix Moscheles (the nephew of Mendelssohn and baby of the Cradle Song) painted Mazzini. Concerning its subject the Memoir notes: 'In the course of 1872 I lost a good friend in Mazzini, whose enthusiasms, Italian and religious, I at that time scarcely shared, but whose conversation and close friendship I deeply valued…. The modernness of the Universal Cigarette Smoking Craze may be judged by the fact that Mazzini was the first man I ever knew who was constantly smoking cigarettes.'
The rest was a medley impossible to catalogue: portraits of Charles Lamb, who had been the grandfather's friend; a scarce proclamation by the Pretender; medals and other 'Caryll' relics; rapiers, pistols which had travelled with Sir Charles through America; a section of the Trinity Hall boat which was head of the river in 1862 and 1864; seven cups, trophies of rowing, walking, fencing, and shooting matches, with shots dug up on his Toulon estate which were mementoes of the British blockades of the town. Apart from works of reference, a special case was given to autographed books from Hood, Rogers the poet, Gambetta, Laveleye, Louis Blanc, Castelar, Cardinal Manning, Queen Victoria, and many more. In this collection figured all Sir Charles's college prizes, carefully preserved; the family Bible of Lord Leicester, uncle to Sir Philip Sidney, with Dilke family entries; and a little volume in which his second wife had written for him some of the most beautiful passages from 'Queens' Gardens' in Sesame and Lilies; it was bound in white vellum and 'blessed by Ruskin.' Here, too, were many Keats letters and books afterwards left by will to Hampstead.
A hoard of treasures filled a little book-room above—his mother's sketches, drawings of his first wife driving her ponies in Sloane Street, photographs and trinkets of hers, old family caricatures, and also some original sketches by Leech. In the room next to it, occupied by his grandmother till her death in 1882, was a John Collier of the first Lady Dilke.
When the grandmother's sitting-room was used later by Sir Charles's second wife, its main features were a small reference library of French art and a collection of books on Labour. Before the fireplace, on the writing-table as it was in 1885, were bowls of French porcelain filled once a week with fresh flowers from the Toulon garden—paper white narcissus and purple anemones or big violets of Provençal growth.