II. ROME 275

my usual shyness, and also because I have held it a first principle of manners not to waylay people;-above all, not to stop them when they are going out, I made no sign, and leaving them to descend the reverting stair in peace, climbed, at still slackening pace, the remaining steps to Mr. Severn’s door, and left my card and letter of introduction with the servant, who told me he had just gone out. His dark-eyed companion was George Richmond, to whom, also, Acland had given me a letter. Both Mr. Severn and he came immediately to see us. My father and mother’s quiet out-of-the-wayness at first interested, soon pleased, and at last won them, so completely, that before Christmas came, out of all people in Rome they chose us to eat their Christmas dinner with. Much more for my father’s sake and mother’s, than mine; not that they were uninterested in me also, but as my ways of out-of-the-wayness were by no means quiet, but perpetually firing up under their feet in little splutters and spitfires of the most appalling heresy; and those not only troublesome in immediate crackle, but carried out into steady, and not always refutable, objection to nearly everything sacred in their sight, of the autocratic masters and authentic splendours of Rome, their dialogues with me were apt to resolve themselves into delicate disguises of necessary reproof; and even with my father and mother, into consultation as to what was best to be done to bring me to anything like a right mind. The old people’s confidence in them had been unbounded from the first, in consequence of Mr. Severn’s having said to Mr. Richmond when they met me on the stairs, “What a poetical countenance!”-and my recently fanatical misbehaviour in the affair of the “Harlech,”¹ coupled with my now irrepressible impertinences to Raphael and Domenichino, began to give me in my parents’ eyes something of the distant aspect of the Prodigal Son.

37. The weight of adverse authority which I had thus to

¹ [See above, pp. 257-8.]

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