I cannot think of anything for which I would exchange the enchanting volumes of Walter Pater, and yet even he is not the ideal aesthetic critic whose duties he made clear. What he has done is to give us the most exquisite and delicate of interpretations. He has not failed to "disengage" the subtle and peculiar pleasure that each picture, each poem or personality, has in store for us; but of analysis and explanation of this pleasure--of which he speaks in the Introduction to "The Renaissance"--there is no more. In the first lines of his paper on Botticelli, the author asks, "What is the peculiar sensation which his work has the property of exciting in us?" And to what does he finally come? "The peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain conditions...with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things from which it sinks." But this is not aesthetic analysis! It is not even the record of a "peculiar sensation," but a complex intellectual interpretation. Where is the pleasure in the irrepressible outline, fascinating in its falseness,--in the strange color, like the taste of olives, of the Spring and the Pallas? So, also, his great passage on the Mona Lisa, his "Winckelmann," even his "Giorgione" itself, are merely wonderful delineations of the mood of response to the creations of the art in question. Such interpretation as we have from Pater is a priceless treasure, but it is none the less the final cornice, and not the corner stone of aesthetic criticism.