all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the
gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in
itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either,
an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for
one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief,
if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed
altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the
student of the human drama has ever caught sight of--granting always,
that is, that some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to his
part. Such was the sort of recognition, assuredly, under which Rupert
played _his_--that of his lending himself to every current and
contact, the "newer," the later fruit of time, the better; only this not
because any particular one was an agitating revelation, but because with
due sensibility, with a restless inward ferment, at the centre of them
all, what could he possibly so much feel like as the heir of all the
ages? I remember his originally giving me, though with no shade of
imputable intention, the sense of his just _being_ that, with the
highest amiability--the note in him that, as I have hinted, one kept
coming back to; so that during a long wait for another glimpse of him I
thought of the practice and function so displayed as wholly engaging,
took for granted his keeping them up with equal facility and pleasure.
Nothing could have been more delightful accordingly, later on, in
renewal of the personal acquaintance than to gather that this was
exactly what had been taking place, and with an inveteracy as to which
his letters are a full documentation. Whatever his own terms for the
process might be had he been brought to book, and though the variety of
his terms for anything and everything was the very play, and even the
measure, of his talent, the most charmed and conclusive description of
him was that no young man had ever so naturally taken on under the
pressure of life the poetic nature, and shaken it so free of every