THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES 

 GATES PERCIVAL. 



THIS is an interesting and in many respects instruc- 

 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 



