looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things--things greater,
doubtless, at times, than the intentions of the artist. And yet he made
few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to
like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but
never vulgarly. At Venice, for a couple of days, he had half a fit of
melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way, and
that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the coloring
of Titian and Paul Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had
themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple
of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular
movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the
end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola,
and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal
bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square. In Rome his
first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again. But the
old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he
really found what he had been looking for from the first--the complete
antipodes of Northampton. And indeed Rome is the natural home of those
spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick--the
spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and
the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of
convention. The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors
the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows. And in that still
recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to
men's eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four
black horses. Roderick's first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel.
He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than
he could express: he was sure that life must have there, for all one's
senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must
happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that