illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was
well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless
facts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that his
resistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his written
productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a
very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably
referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy,
seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors
appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked
for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar
metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that
Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such
unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for
evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no
mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the
prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced
into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional
consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its
ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not
necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and
need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark
that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine
substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an
epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author
of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young
Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have
given him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of
the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as young
enough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spoken
mistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway parting