were a hundred
times more capable than Roderick of a reflective impertinence. Roderick
received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted
advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the
proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms
on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there,
doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too
adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at
most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene
inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what
friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they
spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities
(of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence. His
appearance enforced these impressions--his handsome face, his radiant,
unaverted eyes, his childish, unmodulated voice. Afterwards, when those
who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted
comeliness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.

Certainly, among the young men of genius who, for so many ages, have
gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning
than Roderick. He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good
fortune; he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and
play. He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and
chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms. It all seemed part
of a kind of divine facility. He was passionately interested, he was
feeling his powers; now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing
aesthetic atmosphere of Rome, the ardent young fellow should be pardoned
for believing that he never was to see the end of them. He enjoyed
immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the downright
act of production. He kept models in his studio till they dropped with
fatigue; he drew, on other days, at the Capitol and the Vatican, till
his own head swam with his eagerness, and his limbs stiffened with the
cold. He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called
an "Adam," and was pushing it rapidly toward completion. There were
naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and
cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to
the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk. They
were