I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his 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 of his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed a presumption against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a speedy baldness could have removed.

It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede’s illusion, which shows no signs of leaving him.  It is true that he no longer hears expressions of surprise at his youthfulness, on a first introduction to an admiring reader; but this sort of external evidence has become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion.  His manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes on others, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part of the young genius.  As to the incongruity of his contour and other little accidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they will affect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious how much her rouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard with affectionate reverence.