JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 133 



He believed himself as gigantic as the shadow he cast on 

 these rolling mists of insubstantial adulation, and life-long 

 he could never make out why his fine words refused to 

 butter his parsnips for him, nay, to furnish both parsnips 

 and sauce. While the critics were debating precisely how 

 many of the prime qualities of the great poets of his own 

 and preceding generations he combined in his single genius, 

 and in what particular respects he surpassed them all a 

 point about which he himself seems never to have had any 

 doubts the public, which could read Scott and Byron with 

 avidity, and which was beginning even to taste Wordsworth, 

 found his verses inexpressibly wearisome. They would not 

 throng and subscribe for a collected edition of those works 

 which singly had been too much for them. With whatever 

 dulness of sense they may be charged, they have a remark 

 ably keen scent for tediousness, and will have none of it 

 unless in a tract or sermon, where, of course, it is to be 

 expected. Percival never forgave the public ; but it was 

 the critics he never should have forgiven, for of all the 

 maggots that can make their way into the brains through 

 the ears, there is none so disastrous as the persuasion that 

 you are a great poet. There is surely something in the 

 construction of the ears of small authors which lays them 

 specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles 

 pleasantly while it eats away the fibre of will, and 

 incapacitates a man for all honest commerce with realities. 

 Unhappily its insidious titillation seems to have been 

 Percival s one great pleasure during life. 



We began by saying that the book before us was interest 

 ing and instructive ; but we meant that it was so not so 

 much from any positive merits of its own as by the lesson 

 which almost every page of it suggests. To those who have 

 some knowledge of the history of literature, or some 

 experience in life, it is from beginning to end a history of 

 weakness mistaking great desires for great powers. If 

 poetry, in Bacon s noble definition of it, &quot; adapt the shows 

 of things to the desires of the mind,&quot; sentimentalism is 

 equally skilful in making realities shape themselves to the 



