encumbrance by simply wearing it as he wore his complexion or his
outline.

That, then, was the way the imagination followed him with its luxury of
confidence: he was doing everything that could be done in the time
(since this was the modernest note), but performing each and every
finest shade of these blest acts with a poetic punctuality that was only
matched by a corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly my being
sure of it all the while, even if with little current confirmation
beyond that supplied by his first volume of verse; and the effect of the
whole record is now to show that such a conclusion was quite
extravagantly right. He _was_ constantly doing all the things, and
this with a reckless freedom, as it might be called, that really
dissociated the responsibility of the precious character from anything
like conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which no troubled young
singer, none, that is, equally troubled, had perhaps ever felt he could
afford to dissociate it. Rupert's resources for affording, in the whole
connection, were his humour, his irony, his need, under every quiver of
inspiration, toward whatever end, to be amused and amusing, and to find
above all that this could never so much occur as by the application of
his talent, of which he was perfectly conscious, to his own case. He
carried his case with him, for purposes of derision as much as for any
others, wherever he went, and how he went everywhere, thus blissfully
burdened, is what meets us at every turn on his printed page. My only
doubt about him springs in fact from the question of whether he knew
that the earthly felicity enjoyed by him, his possession of the
exquisite temperament linked so easily to the irrepressible experience,
was a thing to make of the young Briton of the then hour so nearly the
spoiled child of history that one wanted something in the way of an
extra guarantee to feel soundly sure of him. I come back once more to