180 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



hundreds of sensitive boys who gradually get the non- 

 sense shaken out of them in the rough school of life. 

 The length of the schooling needful in his case is what 

 makes it peculiar. Not till after he was fifty, if even 

 then, did he learn that the world never takes a man at 

 his own valuation, and never pays money for what it 

 does not want, or think it wants. It did not want his 

 poetry, simply because it was not, is not, and by no con- 

 ceivable power of argument can be made, interesting, 

 the first duty of every artistic product. Percival, who 

 would have thought his neighbors mad if they had in- 

 sisted on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators mere- 

 ly because they had been at the trouble of making them, 

 and found it convenient to turn them into cash, could 

 never forgive the world for taking this business view of 

 the matter in his own case. He went on doggedly, 

 making refrigerators of every possible pattern, and com- 

 forted himself with the thought of a wiser posterity, 

 which should have learned that the purpose of poetry is 

 to cool and not to kindle. His "Mind," which is on 

 the whole perhaps the best of his writings, vies in cold- 

 ness with the writings of his brother doctor, Akenside, 

 whose " Pleasures of Imagination" are something quite 

 other than pleasing in reality. If there be here and 

 there a semblance of pale fire, it is but the reflection of 

 moonshine upon ice. Akenside is respectable, because 

 he really had something new to say, in spite of his pom- 

 pous, mouthing way of saying it ; but when Percival 

 says it over again, it is a little too much. In his more 

 ambitious pieces, and it is curious how literally the 

 word " pieces " applies to all he did, he devotes him- 

 self mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if 

 mankind were not always more than satisfied with any 

 one who fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them, 

 with the least possible fuss, what it is. Percival was 



