LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 139 



trained even such faculty as was in him, but to have gone on to 

 the end mistaking excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of 

 thought. The consequence is a prolonged immaturity, which 

 makes his latest volume, published in 1843, as crude and as 

 plainly wanting in enduring quality as the first number of his 

 Clio. 7 We have the same old complaints of neglected genius 

 as if genius could ever be neglected so long as it has the 

 perennial consolation of its own divine society the same wilted 

 sentiment, the same feeling about for topics of verse in which he 

 may possibly find that inspiration from without which the true 

 poet cannot flee from in himself. These tedious wailings about 

 heavenly powers suffocating in the heavy atmosphere of an 

 uncongenial, unrecognising world and Percival is profuse of 

 them are simply an advertisement to whoever has ears of some 

 innate disability in the man who utters them. Heavenly powers 

 know very well how to take care of themselves. The poor 

 World, meaning thereby that small fraction of society which 

 has any personal knowledge of an author or his affairs, has had 

 great wrong done it in such matters. It is not, and never was, 

 the powers of a man that it neglects it could- not if it would 

 but his weakness, and especially the publication of them, of 

 which it grows weary. It can never supply any mari with what 

 is wanting in himself, and the attempt to do it only makes bad 

 worse. If a man can find the proof of his own genius only in 

 public appreciation still worse, if his vanity console itself 

 with taking it as an evidence of rare qualities in himself that his 

 fellow-mortals are unable to see them it is all up with him. The 

 4 World resolutely refused to find Wordsworth entertaining, and 

 it refuses still, on good grounds ; but the genius that was in&quot;him 

 bore up unflinchingly, would take no denial, got its claim 

 admitted on all hands, and impregnated at last the literature of 

 an entire generation, though habitans in sicco, if ever genius 

 did. But Percival seems to have satisfied himself with a syllo 

 gism something like this : Men of genius are neglected ; the 

 more neglect, the more genius ; I am altogether neglected ergo, 

 wholly made up of that priceless material. 



The truth was that he suffered rather from overappreciation ; 

 and when, says a nameless old Frenchman, I see a man go 

 up like a rocket, I expect before long to see the stick come 

 down. The times were singularly propitious to mediocrity. As 

 in Holland one had only to 



Invent a shovel and be a magistrate, 



so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be immortal, till 



