sight on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yet
each of these young men was immediately perceived to have embodied the
gallantry of his country. The extraordinary popularity of Rupert Brooke
is due to the excellence of his verse, to the tact with which it was
presented to the public, but also to a vague perception of his
representative nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain type
produced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our national
necessity.

It is needless to describe the verses of Rupert Brooke, which have
attained a circulation which any poet might envy. They are comprised in
two slender volumes, that above mentioned, and one of 1911, published
while he was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, and when he died
off Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic pathos, he had not
completed his twenty-eighth year. He was, unlike the majority of his
contemporaries, a meticulous and reserved writer, little inclined to be
pleased with his work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation.
Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or Fergusson, he left
a very slender garland of verse behind him, in which there is scarcely a
petal which is not of some permanent value. For instance, in the volume
of 1911 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude in taste and
petulant in temper; but even these now illustrate a most interesting
character of which time has rounded the angles, and we would not have
otherwise what illustrates so luminously--and so divertingly--that
precious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke.

Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may be
misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the poet's memory with
idolatry. There is some evidence of a Rupert Brooke legend in the
process of formation, which deserves to be guarded against not less
jealously than the R.L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know
that for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured until
they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was far from being either a
plaster saint or a vivid public witness. He was neither a trumpet nor a
torch. He lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling and
attentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of the pageantry of
life. Existence was a wonderful harmony to Rupert Brooke, who was
determined to lose no tone of it by making too much noise himself. In
company he was not a great talker, but loved to listen, wit