LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 183 



solemnly at last, and stalks away conscientiously eschew* 

 ing whatever would serve to hide the naked wood, — 

 nay, was it not Gray's only that were scandalous, and 

 were not his own, modelled upon those of the sainted 

 Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after all 1 Percival, 

 like all imitators, is caught by the defects of what he 

 copies, and exaggerates them. With him the stilts are 

 the chief matter ; and getting a taller pair than either 

 of his predecessors, he lifts his commonplace upon them 

 only to make it more drearily conspicuous. Shelley has 

 his gleams of unearthly wildfire, Wordsworth is by fits 

 the most deeply inspired man of his generation ; but 

 Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously and 

 unappeasably dull, — as dull as a comedy of Goethe. 

 He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We 

 should not have thought this of any consequence now, 

 for we need not try to read him, did not Mr. Ward with 

 amusing gravity all along assume that he was a great 

 poet. There was scarce timber enough in him for the 

 making of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he 

 somewhat resembles. 



Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for 

 a man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so 

 imperfect a classical training (in spite of the numerous 

 " testimonials " cited by Mr. Ward) that he was capable 

 of laying the accent on the second syllable of Pericles, 

 he seems never to have systematically trained even such 

 faculty as was in him, but to have gone on to the end 

 mistaking excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of 

 thought. The consequence is a prolonged immaturity, 

 which makes his latest volume, published in 1843, as 

 crude and as plainly wanting in enduring quality as the 

 first number of his " Clio." We have the same old com- 

 plaints of neglected genius, — as if genius could ever be 

 neglected so long as it has the perennial consolation of 



