an object deserving study, it will be time to censure his faults when we have clearly estimated his merits; and if we are wise judges, not till then. WALTER PATER. (1839-1894) XI.--SANDRO BOTTICELLI. Of the critics who have written during the last sixty years, Mr. Pater is probably the most remarkable. His work is always weighted with thought, and his thought is always fused with imagination. He unites, in a singular degree of intensity, the two crucial qualities of the critic, on the one hand a sense of form and colour and artistic utterance, on the other hand a speculative instinct which pierces behind these to the various types of idea and mood and character that underlie them. He is equally alive to subtle resemblances and to subtle differences, and art is to him not merely an intellectual enjoyment, but something which is to be taken into the spirit of a man and to become part of his life. Of the _history_ of literature, and the problems that rise out of it, he takes but small account. But for the other function assigned by Carlyle to criticism, for criticism as a "creative art, aiming to reproduce under a different shape the existing product of the artist, and painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the heart and the imagination"--for this no man has done more than Mr. Pater. With wider knowledge and a clearer consciousness of the deeper issues involved, he may be said to have taken up the work of Lamb and to have carried it forward in a spirit which those who best love Lamb will be the most ready to admire. Of Mr. Pater's literary criticisms, those on Wordsworth and Coleridge are perhaps the most striking. But he was probably still more at home in interpreting the work of the great painters. And of his "appreciations" of painters none is more characteristic than his study of Botticelli. It was written in 1870, and published in _The Renaissance_ in 1873.