leasanter abroad than at home; most
hospitable, kindly, and eager to be pleased and to please. You see a
family half a dozen times in a week in the little Roman circle, whom
you shall not meet twice in a season afterwards in the enormous London
round. When Easter is over and everybody is going away at Rome, you and
your neighbour shake hands, sincerely sorry to part: in London we are
obliged to dilute our kindness so that there is hardly any smack of the
original milk. As one by one the pleasant families dropped off with whom
Clive had spent his happy winter; as Admiral Freeman's carriage drove
away, whose pretty girls he had caught at St. Peter's kissing St.
Peter's toe; as Dick Denby's family ark appeared with all Denby's sweet
young children kissing farewells to him out of the window; as those
three charming Miss Baliols with whom he had that glorious day in the
Catacombs; as friend after friend quitted the great city with kind
greetings, warm pressures of the hand, and hopes of meeting in a yet
greater city on the banks of the Thames, young Clive felt a depression
of spirit. Rome was Rome, but it was pleasanter to see it in company;
our painters are smoking still at the Oafs Greco, but a society all
smoke and all painters did not suit him. If Mr. Clive is not a Michael
Angelo or a Beethoven, if his genius is not gloomy, solitary, gigantic,
shining alone, like a lighthouse, a storm round about him, and breakers
dashing at his feet, I cannot help myself: he is as Heaven made him,
brave, honest, gay, and friendly, and persons of a gloomy turn must not
look to him as a hero.

So Clive and his companion worked away with all their hearts from
November until far into April when Easter came, and the glorious gala
with which the Roman Church celebrates that holy season. By this time
Clive's books were full of sketches. Ruins, imperial and mediaeval;
peasants and bagpipemen; Passionists with shaven polls; Capuchins and
the equally hairy frequenters of the Cafe Greco; painters of all nations
who resort there; Cardinals and their queer equipages and attendants;
the Holy Father himself (it was Gregory sixteenth of the name); the
dandified English on the Pincio and the wonderful Roman members of the
hunt--were not all these designed by the young man and admired by his
friends in after-days? J. J.'s sketches were few, but he had painted two
beautiful little pictures, and sold them for so good a price that Prince
Polonia's people w