Oppressed with these feelings, Roderic was accustomed to withdraw
himself from the pomps and luxuries that surrounded him, to fly from the
gilded palace and the fretted roofs, and to mix in the simple and
undebauched scenes of artless innocence that descended on every side
from the hills he inhabited. The name of Roderic was unknown to all the
shepherds of the vallies, and he was received by them with that
officiousness and hospitality which they were accustomed to exercise to
the stranger. It was his delight to give scope to his imagination by
inventing a thousand artful tales of misfortune, by which he awakened
the compassion, and engaged the attachment of the simple hinds. In order
the more effectually to evade that curiosity which would have been fatal
to his ease, he assumed every different time that he came among them a
different form. By this contrivance, he passed unobserved, he partook
freely of their pastimes, he made his observations unmolested, and was
perfectly at leisure for the reflections, not always of the most
pleasant description, that these scenes, of simple virtue and honest
poverty, were calculated to excite. "Oh, impotence of power," exclaimed
he, wrapt up and secure in the disguise he assumed, "to what purpose art
thou desired? Ambition is surely the most foolish and misjudging of all
terrestrial passions.
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