THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES 

 GATES PERCIVAL. 



is an interesting and in many respects instruc- 

 ' _L tive book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is 

 fitting, in a loving spirit ; and if he over-estimates both 

 what Percival was and what he did, he enables us to 

 form our own judgment by letting him so far as possible 

 speak for himself. The book gives a rather curious 

 picture of what the life of a man of letters is likely to 

 be in a country not yet ripe for literary production, 

 especially if he be not endowed with the higher qualities 

 which command and can wait for that best of all suc 

 cesses which comes slowly. In a generation where 

 everybody can write verses, and where certain modes of 

 thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous 

 that it is as hard to distinguish between the produc 

 tions of one minor poet and another as among those of 

 so many Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a de 

 mand for only two things, for what chimes with the 

 moment's whim of popular sentiment and is forgotten 

 when that has changed, or for what is never an anachro 

 nism, because it slakes or seems to slake the eternal thirst 

 of our nature for those ideal waters that glimmer before 

 us and still before us in ever-renewing mirage. Percival 

 met 'neither of these conditions. With a nature singu 

 larly unplastic, unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was 

 incapable of receiving into his own mind the ordinary 

 emotions of men and giving them back in music ; and 



