LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 191 



Percival's life was by no means a remarkable one, ex 

 cept, perhaps, in the number of chances that seem to 

 have been offered him to make something of himself, 

 if anything were possibly to be made. He was never 

 without friends, never without opportunities, if he could 

 have availed himself of them. It is pleasant to see 

 Mr. Ticknor treating him with that considerate kindness 

 which many a young scholar can remember as shown so 

 generously to himself. But nothing could help Percival, 

 whose nature had defeat worked into its very composition. 

 He was not a real, but an imaginary man. His early 

 attempt at suicide (as Mr. Ward seems to think it) is 

 typical of him. He is not the first young man who, when 

 crossed in love, has spoken of " loupin o'er a linn," nor 

 will he be the last. But that any one who really meant 

 to kill himself should put himself resolutely in the way 

 of being prevented, as Percival did, is hard to believe. 

 Chateaubriand, the arch sentimentalist of these latter 

 days, had the same harmless velleily of self-destruction, 

 enough to scare his sister and so give him a smack of 

 sensation, but a very different thing from the settled 

 will which would be really perilous. Shakespeare, always 

 true to Nature, makes Hamlet dally with the same excit 

 ing fancy. Alas ! self is the one thing the sentimen 

 talist never truly wishes to destroy ! One remarkable 

 gift Percival seems to have had, which may be called 

 memory of the eye. What he saw he never forgot, and 

 this fitted him for a good geological observer. How great 

 his power of combination was, which alone could have 

 made him a great geologist, we cannot determine. But 

 he seems to have shown but little in other directions. 

 His faculty of acquiring foreign tongues we do not value 

 so highly as Mr. Ward. We have known many other 

 wise inferior men who possessed it. Indeed, the power 

 to express the same nothing in ten different languages is 



