xiv INTRODUCTION. 



how much the traveller may have to put up with elsewhere. The 

 picture of Washington society in &quot; Democracy,&quot; the work of an 

 American author, is even more unpleasing, if less agonising, than 

 that delineated by the hapless M. de Bacourt forty years ago ; 

 and the most unreasonable carping of the most exacting and 

 self-sufficient European tourist can hardly be more lamentably 

 peevish than the pages devoted to England by no less an 

 American than Hawthorne. Political prejudice on both sides 

 has also a good deal to do with the occasional acerbity of 

 criticism, which is, however, much ameliorated since Mr. 

 Lowell wrote. 



Passing by the pretty &quot; Garden Acquaintance &quot; and &quot; Good 

 Word for Winter,&quot; we come to another class of Mr. Lowell s 

 American essays those devoted to American men of letters. 

 Of these there are three in this volume those treating of 

 Percival, Thoreau, and Emerson as a lecturer. Mr. Lowell is 

 always at his best when most genial, and the subjects of the 

 first two of these do not allow his geniality scope. He cannot 

 put up with the incompetence of Percival, and the poverty of 

 the literary productiveness that was pleaded as its excuse. 

 Genius itself does not get absolution for its dulcia vitia as easily 

 as it used ; still, when genius is undeniably present, forgiveness 

 is seldom very remote. But the luckless Percival wanted to 

 exemplify all the errors of genius, and to be petted and admired 

 on the strength of them, without complying with the indispens 

 able condition of being a genius. This positively cannot be 

 allowed. Mr. Lowell s estimate of Percival as a poet through 

 all his life, and as a man for the first half of it, is undeniably 

 sound ; but he fails to render justice to him in his peculiar and 

 almost unique character of a pseudo-genius reformed. Mock 

 Byrons usually come to such bad ends, that when we find one of 

 them, in his maturer years, hammer in hand, actually rendering 

 first-rate service to his country as a geologist, one is inclined to 

 exclaim, Meliiis sic poenituisse quam non errasse ! Thoreau is 

 altogether a different sort of person, open, it may be, to the 

 contrary charge of having made a trade of self-reliance, as Per 

 cival did of helplessness. The essayist half reveals a suspicion 



