138 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



could compel the perusal of the greater part of them. Next to 

 Byron comes Moore, whose cloying sentimentalism and too 

 facile melody are recalled by the subject and treatment of very- 

 many of the shorter lyrics of Percival. In &amp;lt; Prometheus it is 

 Shelley who is paramount for the time, and Shelley at his worst 

 period, before his unwieldy abundance of incoherent words and 

 images, that were merely words and images without any mean 

 ing of real experience to give them solidity, had been compressed 

 in the stricter moulds of thought and study. In the blank verse, 

 again, we encounter Wordsworth s tone and sentiment. These 

 were no good models for Percival, who always improvised, and 

 who seems to have thought verse the great distinction between 

 poetry and prose. Percival got nothing from Shelley but the 

 fatal copiousness which is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth 

 but that tendency to preach at every corner about a sympathy 

 with nature which is not his real distinction/ and which becomes 

 a wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and Wordsworth are 

 both stilted, though in different ways. Shelley wreathed his 

 stilts with flowers ; while Wordsworth, protesting against the use 

 of them as sinful, mounts his solemnly at last, and stalks away, 

 conscientiously eschewing whatever would serve to hide the 

 naked wood nay, was it not Gray s only that were scandalous, 

 and were not his own, modelled upon those of the sainted 

 Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after all ? Percival, like 

 all imitators, is caught by the defects of what he copies, and 

 exaggerates them. With him the stilts are the chief matter ; 

 and getting a taller pair than either of his predecessors, he lifts 

 his commonplace upon them only to make it more drearily con 

 spicuous. Shelley has his gleams of unearthly wildfire ; Words 

 worth is by fits the most deeply-inspired man of his generation ; 

 but Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously and 

 unappeasably dull as dull as a comedy of Goethe. He never in 

 his life wrote a rememberable verse. We should not have thought 

 this of any consequence now, for we need not try to read him, 

 did not Mr. Ward with amusing gravity all along assume that 

 he was a great poet. There was scarce timber enough in him 

 for the making of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he 

 somewhat resembles. 



Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for a man 

 so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so imperfect a 

 classical training (in spite of the numerous * testimonials cited 

 by Mr. Ward) that he was capable of laying the accent on the 

 second syllable of Pericles, he seems never to have systematically 



