186 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



to send the news by the next packet to England, and 

 teach her that we were her masters in arts as well as 

 arms. 



Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he 

 forthwith produced his bale of verses from a loom capa- 

 ble of turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards 

 to the hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of 

 our territor}', inasmuch as it was manufactured on the 

 theory of covering the largest surface with the least 

 possible amount of meaning that would hold words 

 together. He was as ready to accept the perilous em- 

 prise, and as loud in asserting his claim thereto, as 

 Sir Kay used to be, and with much the same result. 

 Our critical journals — and America certainly has led 

 the world in a department of letters which of course 

 requires no outfit but the power to read and write, gra- 

 tuitously furnished by our public schools — received him 

 with a shout of welcome. Here came the true deliverer 

 at last, mounted on a steed to which he himself had 

 given the new name of "Pegasus," — for we were to be 

 original in everything, — and certainly blowing his own 

 trumpet with remarkable vigor of lungs. Solitary en- 

 thusiasts, who had long awaited this sublime avatar, 

 addressed him in sonnets which he accepted with a 

 gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr. Ward 

 seems to allow that his sense of humor was hardly equal 

 to his other transcendent endowments.) His path was 

 strewn with laurel — of the native variety, altogether 

 superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not pre- 

 cisely like it. Verses signed *' P.," as like each other as 

 two peas, and as much like poetry as that vegetable 

 is like a peach, were watched for in the corner of a news- 

 paper as an astronomer watches for a new planet. There 

 was never anything so comically unreal since the crown- 

 ing in the Capitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand 



