LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 141 



of lungs. Solitary enthusiasts who had long awaited this sub 

 lime avatar, addressed him in sonnets which he accepted with a 

 gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr. Ward seems 

 to allow that his sense of humour was hardly equal to his other 

 transcendent endowments.) His path was strewn with laurel 

 of the native variety, altogether superior to that of the Old 

 World, at any rate not precisely like it. Verses signed P., as 

 like each other as two peas, and as much like poetry as that 

 vegetable is like a peach, were watched for in the corner of a 

 newspaper as an astronomer watches for a new planet. There 

 was never anything so comically unreal since the crowning in 

 the Capitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand Sentimentalist 

 in Ordinary at the Court of King Robert of Naples. Unhap 

 pily, Percival took it all quite seriously. There was no praise 

 too ample for the easy elasticity of his swallow. He believed 

 himself as gigantic as the shadow he cast on these rolling mists 

 of insubstantial adulation, and life-long he could never make out 

 why his fine words refused to butter his parsnips for him, nay, 

 to furnish both parsnips and sauce. While the critics were de 

 bating precisely how many of the prime qualities of the great 

 poets of his own and preceding generations he combined in his 

 single genius, and in what particular respects he surpassed them 

 all a point about which he himself seems never to have had 

 any doubts the public, which could read Scott and Byron 

 with avidity, and which was beginning even to taste Words 

 worth, found his verses inexpressibly wearisome. They would 

 not throng and subscribe for a collected edition of those works 

 which singly had been too much for them. With whatever dul- 

 ness of sense they may be charged, they have a remarkably 

 keen scent for tediousness, and will have none of it unless in a 

 tract or sermon, where, of course, it is to be expected. Percival 

 never forgave the public ; but it was the critics that he never 

 should have forgiven, for of all the maggots that can make their 

 way into the brains through the ears, there is none so disastrous 

 as the persuasion that you are a great poet. There is surely 

 something in the construction of the ears of small authors which 

 lays them specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles 

 pleasantly while it eats away the fibre of will, and incapacitates 

 a man for all honest commerce with realities. Unhappily its 

 insidious titillation seems to have been Percival s one great 

 pleasure during life. 



We began by saying that the book before us was interesting 

 and instructive; but we meant that it was so not so much from 



