LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 189 



that they should be, then it becomes mischievous, and 

 calls for a protest from all those who have at heart the 

 interests of good morals and healthy literature. It is 

 the theory of idlers and dilettanti, of fribbles in morals 

 and declaimers in verse, which a young man of real 

 power may dally with during some fit of mental indiges- 

 tion, but which when accepted by a mature man, and 

 carried along with him through life, is a sure mark 

 of feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself. Per- 

 cival is a good example of a class of authors unhappily 

 too numerous in these latter days. In Europe the 

 natural growth of a world ill at ease with itself and still 

 nervous with the frightful palpitation of the French 

 Revolution, they are but feeble exotics in our healthier 

 air. Without faith or hope, and deprived of that out- 

 ward support in the habitual procession of events and in 

 the authoritative limitations of thought which in ordi- 

 nary times gives steadiness to feeble and timid intellects, 

 they are turned inward, and forced, like Hudibras's 

 sword, 



" To eat into themselves, for lack 

 Of other thing to hew and hack." 



Compelled to find within them that stay which had hith- 

 erto been supplied by creeds and institutions, they learned 

 to attribute to their own consciousness the grandeur 

 which belongs of right only to the mind of the human 

 race, slowly endeavoring after an equilibrium between 

 its desires and the external conditions under which they 

 are attainable. Hence that exaggeration of the individual, 

 and depreciation of the social man, which has become the 

 cant of modern literature. Abundance of such phenom- 

 ena accompanied the rise of what was called Romanti- 

 cism in Germany and France, reacting to some extent 

 even upon England, and consequently America. The 

 smaller poets erected themselves into a kind of guild, 



