or impassioned acts.” It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum for which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is “quite as much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.” He is really asking for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon his personality. More than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking of “the irrepressible conscience of art.” For many he is, I suppose, chiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary workshops the craftsman’s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his was not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from Flaubert that appear in his essay on “Style.” Those sentences and his comments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a pendant to, an illustration of, Pater’s original remarks, which are themselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of his own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw, a little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert believed. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions of earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it Flaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as follows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art “by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import.” Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only object is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves the watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made inexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves also a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of the words used.