JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 125 



been taken away from their lives, leaving them colder and 

 darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the 

 silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when 

 they met on that day. Their common manhood had lost a 

 kinsman. 



THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES 

 GATES PERCIVAL. 



THIS is an interesting and in many respects instructive 

 book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is fitting, in a 

 loving spirit ; and if he over-estimates both what Percival 

 was and what he did, he enables us to form our own judg 

 ment by letting him so far as possible speak for himself. 

 The book gives a rather curious picture of what the life of 

 a man of letters is likely to be in a country not yet ripe for 

 literary production, especially if he be not endowed with 

 the higher qualities which command and can wait for that 

 best of all successes which comes slowly. In a generation 

 where everybody can write verses, and where certain modes 

 of thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous 

 that it is as hard to distinguish between the productions of 

 one minor poet and another as among those of so many 

 Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a demand for only 

 two things for what chimes with the moment s whim of 

 popular sentiment and is forgotten when that has changed, 

 or for what is never an anachronism, because it slakes or 

 seems to slake the eternal thirst of our nature for those 

 ideal waters that glimmer before us and still before us in 

 ever renewing mirage. Percival met neither of these con 

 ditions. With a nature singularly unplastic, unsympathetic, 

 and self-involved, he was incapable of receiving into his 

 own mind the ordinary emotions of men and giving them 

 back in music ; and with a lofty conception of the object 

 and purposes of poesy, he had neither the resolution nor 

 the power which might have enabled him to realise it. He 

 offers as stiiking an example as could be found of the 



