JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 129 



paramount for the time, and Shelley at his worst period, 

 before his unwieldy abundance of incoherent words and 

 images, that were merely words and images without any 

 meaning of real experience to give them solidity, had been 

 compressed in the stricter moulds of thought and study. 

 In the blank verse, again, we encounter Wordsworth s tone 

 and sentiment. These were no good models for Percival, 

 who always improvised, and who seems to have thought 

 verse the great distinction between poetry and prose. 

 Percival got nothing from Shelley but the fatal copiousness 

 which is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that tend 

 ency to preach at every corner about a sympathy with 

 nature which is not his real distinction, and which becomes 

 a wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and Wordsworth 

 are both stilted, though in different ways. Shelley wreathed 

 his stilts with flowers ; while Wordsworth, protesting 

 against the use of them as sinful, mounts his solemnly at 

 last, and stalks away, conscientiously eschewing whatever 

 would serve to hide the naked wood nay, was it not Gray s 

 only that were scandalous, and were not his own, modelled 

 upon those of the sainted Oowper, of strictly orthodox pat 

 tern after all ? Percival, like all imitators, is caught by the 

 defects of what he copies, and exaggerates them. With 

 him the stilts are the chief matter ; and getting a taller 

 pair than either of his predecessors, he lifts his common 

 place upon them only to make it more drearily conspicuous. 

 Shelley has his gleams of unearthly wildfire ; Wordsworth 

 is by fits the most deeply-inspired man of his generation ; 

 but Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously 

 and unappeasably dull as dull as a comedy of Goethe. 

 He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We 

 should not have thought this of any consequence now, for 

 we need not try to read him, did not Mr. Ward with 

 amusing gravity all along assume that he was a great poet. 

 There was scarce timber enough in him for the making 

 of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he somewhat 

 resembles. 



Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for a 



137 



