130 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL, 



man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so im 

 perfect a classical training (in spite of the numerous &quot; testi 

 monials &quot; cited by Mr. Ward) that he was capable of laying 

 the accent on the second syllable of Pericles, he seems 

 never to have systematically trained even such faculty as 

 was in him, but to have gone on to the end mistaking 

 excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of thought. 

 The consequence is a prolonged immaturity, which makes 

 his latest volume, published in 1843, as crude and as plainly 

 wanting in enduring quality as the first number of his 

 &quot; Clio.&quot; We have the same old complaints of neglected 

 genius as if genius could ever be neglected so long as it 

 has the perennial consolation of its own divine society the 

 same wilted sentiment, the same feeling about for topics of 

 verse in which he may possibly find that inspiration from 

 without which the true poet cannot flee from in himself. 

 These tedious wailings about heavenly powers suffocating 

 in the heavy atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrecognising 

 world and Percival is profuse of them are simply an 

 advertisement to whoever has ears of some innate disability 

 in the man who utters them. Heavenly powers know very 

 well how to take care of themselves. The poor &quot; World,&quot; 

 meaning thereby that small fraction of society which has 

 any personal knowledge of an author or his affairs, has had 

 great wrong done it in such matters. It is not, and never 

 was, the powers of a man that it neglects it could not if it 

 would but his weakness, and especially the publication of 

 them, of which it grows weary. It can never supply any 

 man with what is wanting in himself, and the attempt to 

 do it only makes bad worse. If a man can find the proof 

 of his own genius only in public appreciation still worse, 

 if his vanity console itself with taking it as an evidence of 

 rare qualities in himself that his fellow-mortals are unable 

 to see them it is all up with him. The &quot;World&quot; 

 resolutely refused to find Wordsworth entertaining, and it 

 refuses still, on good grounds ; but the genius that was in 

 him bore up unflinchingly, would take no denial, got its 

 claim admitted on all hands, and impregnated at last the 



