The Memoir records at length the course of a correspondence with Joseph Severn, on the subject of his portraits of Keats, about which the old man's memory, in his last days at Rome, had grown very hazy. He thought that the miniature from which the engraving for Mr. Buxton Forman's edition had been made was the original presented to Fanny Brawne, whereas it was the copy made for old Mr. Dilke from that original, which itself was afterwards 'bought by my grandfather to prevent its being sold by auction.' There was also at Pyrford a copy in oils made for Mr. Moxon, which Sir Charles had obtained by exchange from Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson.
'After completing my investigations as to the portraits, I placed them on record in a letter to my old friend Scharf, the Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery, who replied: "Thanks for your interesting note, which we will duly place upon record. The portrait which we have here is posthumous. Severn painted it in 1821, and we hold a very curious letter from him describing the circumstances under which he painted it." Here, therefore, is another undoubted Severn in addition to the three which I possess. But I know myself of at least one other.'
The gift of his collection of Keats relics to Hampstead has been elsewhere recorded. In deciding on Hampstead for its resting-place, he brought it within the circle of local associations with Keats himself, and with the grandfather who had been Keats's friend. [Footnote: The Memoir records, in 1878, a visit paid with his great-uncle, William Dilke, to Wentworth Place, 'the little house at Hampstead in which for a time Mr. C. W. Dilke and his brother were Keats's next-door neighbours.']
Modern French authors interested him more than their English contemporaries. In the former case he found, perhaps, less declension from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Staël's Germany. Dumas he loved then and always, returning to him with ever new delight, and utilizing the rare periods of inaction imposed upon him at intervals by illness to read the whole of The Three Musketeers series 'through again—properly.' Where other writers who held sway over the mind of France during the nineteenth century were in question, his independence of taste came into play. Sainte-Beuve he could 'make nothing of.' For Chateaubriand he felt something like contempt: 'Equally feeble as a maker and a writer of history … the inventor of a drawing-room Christianity without Christ;' but he recognized the high quality to be found in the early writings of Sénancour. In later days the revival of a Stendhal cult filled him with wondering amusement. To the best work of Renan his affections were always faithful: Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse was among his favourite volumes. Anatole France gave him exquisite pleasure, and it is hard to say whether he most enjoyed the wit, the irony, or the style of that great writer. He had his favourites, too, among the minor gods, and was always ready to introduce a new-comer to the charms of François de Barbizanges or the fun of Alfred Capus.
In French poetry his taste was eclectic. His feeling for Charles d'Orléans and his contemporaries barely stopped on this side idolatry; but the classics of the seventeenth century had no message for him, and Victor Hugo as a poet left him, for the most part, unmoved. Indeed, he asserted that all French verse between Ronsard and Verlaine was purely rhetorical, and without genuine poetic quality. But in some modern poets, he thought, the true spirit of French poetry had revived. Early he proclaimed the genius of Charles Guérin, whose claim to high place in his country's literature remained unrecognized till after his death; early, too, he hailed a new poetic star in François Porché. The star seemed to him later to wane in brilliancy, but the disappointment with which he read the poems of M. Porché's second period never weakened his admiring recollection of the splendour of the poet's Russian verses and the searching pathos of Solitude au Loin.
His familiarity with French literature, his hearty affection for it, his understanding of the national spirit by which it is informed and quickened, constituted one of the strongest ties which bound him in sympathy to his French friends. The literary forms which have had so much attraction for the best French minds both before and after 1789— the chronicle and the memoir—were precisely those to which his unfailing interest in human nature led him by choice. Paradin and Froissart were companions of whom he never grew tired; and it would be difficult to decide whether he found more absorbing matter of entertainment in Sully or Mme. de Dino.
But if he read these authors for delight, he read them also as a serious student. On this point the testimony of one of the most learned men in contemporary France is clear. M. Salomon Reinach writes: [Footnote: In a letter addressed to the editor, and written in English.]
"Talking with Sir Charles Dilke about Renaissance and modern history, I soon perceived that he had taken the trouble of going to the sources, and that he had read and knew many things of importance which a man of letters, and even a scholar, are apt to ignore. It was Sir Charles, to give only one instance, who revealed to me the value of Guillaume Paradin's Histoire de Notre Temps and Chronique de Savoie, which he admired to such a degree that he put the now forgotten author (the name of whom is not in the British Encyclopaedia) on the same level as Guicciardini and the great historians of antiquity. I would like to know how he discovered Paradin, and if copies of his rare works were in his library. When I happened to get hold of Major Frye's manuscript, afterwards published by me (thanks to Sir Charles Dilke's recommendation) at Heinemann's, he was the first to appreciate its interest, and gave me much information about abbreviated names and other allusions which occur in that diary. He chanced to dine with me the very evening when I first had brought the manuscript to my house, and he remained till past one in the morning, picturesquely seated on the edge of a table, reading passages aloud and commenting upon them. He also knew many secret and unrecorded facts about recent French history; some of them have been given by him in unsigned articles of the Athenaeum, in reviews of books relating to the Franco-German War. I hope he may have left some more detailed notes on that subject. I would have had the greatest pleasure in corresponding with him, and regret I did not do so; but his handwriting was as mysterious as his mind was clear, and I soon found that I could not make it out."