in not being alarmed.  When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and that we were close upon the rocks.  It is, in fact, another case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be tied to the mast.  He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of qualities.  I don’t understand so much force going with so much weakness—­such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses.  The poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it.  I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood for listening.  I suppose there is some key or other to his character, but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can’t believe that Providence is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away.  He perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience, he still fascinates me.  Sometimes I think he has n’t a grain of conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess.  He takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate.  He has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil alike he takes up a formidable space.  There ’s too much of him for me, at any rate.  Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that.  He ’s inflexible, he ’s brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of soul, he has n’t what I call a heart.  He has something that Miss Garland took for one, and I ’m pretty sure she ’s a judge.  But she judged on scanty evidence.  He has something that Christina Light, here, makes believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all!  I think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure in conduct:  is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?...  Roderick’s standard is immensely high; I must do him that justice.  He will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them.  This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples—­a city where ‘pleasure’ is actively cultivated—­in very bad company.  Are they all like that, all the men of genius?  There are a great many artists here who hammer away at their trade with exemplary industry; in fact I am surprised at their success in reducing the matter to a steady, daily grind:  but I really don’t think that one of them has his exquisite quality of talent.  It is in the matter of quantity that he has broken down.  The bottle won’t pour; he turns it upside down; it ’s no use!  Sometimes he declares it ’s empty—­that he has done all he was made to do.  This I consider great nonsense; but I would nevertheless take him on his own terms if it was only I that was concerned.  But I keep thinking of those two praying, trusting neighbors of yours, and