sentenced to silence, he could still preserve his old boyishness; even his childish amusements. 'We grown people,' he says in an essay, 'can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes till the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed'—whereas a child must have a toy sword or fight with a bit of furniture. Indeed, he was not above toys in later days. He spent a large part of one winter, as Mr. Balfour tells us, building with toy bricks; and, beginning to join in a schoolboy's amusement of tin soldiers, developed an elaborate 'war game' which occupied many hours at Davos. We can understand why Symonds called him 'sprite,' The amazing vitality which kept him going under the most depressing influences was combined with the 'sprite's' capricious, and, to most adults, unintelligible modes of spending superfluous energy. Whatever he took up, serious or trifling, novel writing, childish toys, or even, for a time, political agitation, he threw his whole soul into it as if it were the sole object of existence. He impressed one at first sight as a man whose nerves were always in a state of over-tension. Baxter says that Cromwell was a man 'of such a vivacity,
