III


No detail of Mr Marsh's admirable memoir may I allow myself to
anticipate. I can only announce it as a picture, with all the elements
in iridescent fusion, of the felicity that fairly dogged Rupert's steps,
as we may say, and that never allowed him to fall below its measure. We
shall read into it even more relations than nominally appear, and every
one of them again a flourish, every one of them a connection with his
time, a "sampling" of it at its most multitudinous and most
characteristic; every one of them too a record of the state of some
other charmed, not less than charming party--even when the letter-
writer's expression of the interest, the amusement, the play of fancy,
of taste, of whatever sort of appreciation or reaction for his own
spirit, is the ostensible note. This is what I mean in especial by the
constancy with which, and the cost at which, perhaps not less, for
others, the poetic sensibility was maintained and guaranteed. It was as
genuine as if he had been a bard perched on an eminence with a harp, and
yet it was arranged for, as we may say, by the close consensus of those
who had absolutely to know their relation with him but as a delight and
who wanted therefore to keep him, to the last point, true to himself.
His complete curiosity and sociability might have made him, on these
lines, factitious, if it had not happened that the people he so
variously knew and the contacts he enjoyed were just of the kind to
promote most his facility and vivacity and intelligence of life. They
were all young together, allowing for three or four notable, by which I
mean far from the least responsive, exceptions; they were all fresh and
free and acute and aware and in "the world," when not out of it; all
together at the high speculative, the high talkative pitch of the