If Roderick
took the words out of your mouth when you were just prepared to deliver
them with the most effective accent, he did it with a perfect good
conscience and with no pretension of a better right to being heard, but
simply because he was full to overflowing of his own momentary thought
and it sprang from his lips without asking leave. There were persons who
waited on your periods much more deferentially, who were a hundred
times more capable than Roderick of a reflective impertinence. Roderick
received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted
advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the
proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms
on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there,
doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too
adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at
most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene
inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what
friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they
spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities
(of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence.
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