132 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



the glorious opportunity 1 Not we indeed ! So surely a?, 

 Franklin invented the art of printing, and Fulton the 

 steam-engine, we would invent us a great poet in time to 

 send the news by the next packet to England, and teach 

 her that we were her masters in arts as well as arms. 



Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he forth 

 with produced his bale of verses from a loom capable of 

 turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards to the 

 hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of our ter 

 ritory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the theory of 

 covering the largest surface with the least possible amount 

 of meaning that would hold words together. He was as 

 ready to accept the perilous emprise, and as loud in asserting 

 his claim thereto, as Sir Kay used to be, and with much the 

 same result. Our critical journals and America certainly 

 has led the world in a department of letters which of course 

 requires no outfit but the power to read and write, gra 

 tuitously furnished by our public schools received him with 

 a shout of welcome. Here came the true deliverer at last, 

 mounted on a steed to which he himself had given the new 

 name of &quot;Pegasus,&quot; for we were to be original in everything 

 and certainly blowing his own trumpet with remarkable 

 vigour of lungs. Solitary enthusiasts who had long awaited 

 this sublime avatar, addressed him in sonnets which he ac 

 cepted with a gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr 

 Ward seems to allow that his sense of humour was hardly 

 equal to his other transcendent endowments.) His path 

 was strewn with laurel of the native variety, altogether 

 superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not precisely 

 like it. Verses signed &quot;P.,&quot; as like each other as two peas, 

 and as much like poetry as that vegetable is like a peach, 

 were watched for in the corner of a newspaper as an 

 astronomer watches for a new planet. There was never 

 anything so comically unreal since the crowning in the 

 Capitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand Sentimentalist 

 in Ordinary at the Court of King Robert of Naples. 

 Unhappily, Percival took it all quite seriously. There was 

 no praise too ample for the easy elasticity of his swallow. 



