JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 12? 



the first duty of every artistic product. Percival, who 

 would have thought his neighbours mad if they had insisted 

 on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators merely because 

 they had been at the trouble of making them, and found it 

 convenient to turn them into cash, could never forgive the 

 world for taking this business view of the matter in his 

 own case. He went on doggedly, making refrigerators of 

 every possible pattern, and comforted himself with the 

 thought of a wiser posterity, which should have learned 

 that the purpose of poetry is to cool and not to kindle. 

 His &quot; Mind,&quot; which is on the whole perhaps the best of 

 his writings, vies in coldness with the writings of his 

 brother doctor, Akenside, whose &quot;Pleasures of Imagina 

 tion&quot; are something quite other than pleasing in reality. 

 If there be here and there a semblance of pale fire, it 

 is but the reflection of moonshine upon ice. Akenside is 

 respectable, because he really had something new to say, 

 in spite of his pompous, mouthing way of saying it; but 

 when Perciral says it over again, it is a little too much. In 

 his more ambitious pieces and it is curious how literally 

 the word &quot;pieces&quot; applies to all he did he devotes himself 

 mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if man 

 kind were not always more than satisfied with anyone who 

 fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them, with the 

 least possible fuss, what it is. Percival was a professor of 

 poetry rather than a poet, and we are not surprised at the 

 number of lectures he reads us when we learn that in early 

 life he was an excellent demonstrator of anatomy, whose 

 subject must be dead before his business with it begins. 

 His interest in poetry was always more or less scientific. 

 He was for ever trying experiments in matter and form, 

 especially the latter. And these were especially unhappy, 

 because it is plain that he had no musical ear, or at best a 

 very imperfect one. His attempts at classical metres are 

 simply unreadable, whether as verse or prose. He contrives 

 to make even the Sapphic so, which when we read it in 

 Latin moves featly to our modern accentuation. Let any 

 one who wishes to feel the difference between ear and no 



