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.