His practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details sometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole of which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that unity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit of accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber themselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition sometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business to maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. “Pater,” Mr. Benson says, who knew him, “when he had arranged his notes, began to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the effect....” Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make continual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too great a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole dictator and eye the ear’s obedient servant. It would make it difficult to reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even if they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished, highly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to perceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible crowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print, while useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm these sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater aloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult, breathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for their subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two examples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall take them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually written for oral delivery. On page 35 of _Plato and Platonism_[8] there is this sentence: “From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulæ, _Pure Being_, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; ‘The Absolute’; ‘The One’; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.” Now there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons to make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words _Pure Being_ seems to me a manifest concession to the eye.