was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy
to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it
as they strolled in the winter sunshine on the great terrace which looks
toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains. He carried his volume
of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted
half a dozen stanzas to his companion. He was, as a general thing, very
little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the
classics and peruse it for a month in disjointed scraps. He had picked
up Italian without study, and had a wonderfully sympathetic accent,
though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half the lines he
rolled off so sonorously. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood
everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of
his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante. So he lent him
the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into
it. Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten
his wits. He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it
intolerably depressing.

"A sculptor should model as Dante writes--you 're right there," he said.
"But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp.
By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I am a
sculptor at all? A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius; there
are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon
his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it." (It
may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat
reverse of all this.) "If I had only been a painter--a little quiet,
docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton--I should
only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and
attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from
the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that
cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples,
at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping
my brush. Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his
brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every
form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n't have to look at
things only to say,--with tears of rage half the time,--'Oh, yes, it
's wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I d