Then follows the chapter called “Shadows of Events,” which it was well to publish, but about which it is easy to comprehend Pater’s own hesitation. It is a historical survey mainly, but the impression is all clouded and blurred; one cannot help feeling that the one thing lacking to Pater was the very largeness of tolerance which he described so admiringly in Montaigne; certain characteristics, certain brilliant points, attract him; but he cannot visualise what he does not admire. The characters that play a large, robust, coarse, straightforward part are all outside of him, incomprehensible, repellent. The types whom Pater discerned so clearly were those who crept somewhat remotely, spectatorially, even timidly, through the throng, who lived the interior life of thought and speculation and appreciation, tasting the finer savours; not those who strode out boldly, feeling the air of the world their native air. Something of this melancholy aloofness was true of Pater himself, and he draws near only to those in whom he discerns something of the same wistful remoteness. “Looking back afterwards,” says Pater of Gaston, “this singularly self-possessed person had to confess that under (the) influence (of the unsettled conditions of the age) he had lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real differences and oppositions of things in that hotly-coloured world of Paris,—like a shaken tapestry about him.” The last phrase is exactly true of the chapter—it is a shaken tapestry, a multitude of blurred heads and faces, confused gestures, agitated forms. And so we pass to the dignified banishment of Charles, and the arrival of the new king; when across the story breaks the teaching of Bruno—Pantheism, as it is named, “the vision of all things in God,” as the end and aim of all metaphysical speculation. Bruno, originally a Dominican monk, had conceived the idea of the wholeness of life in a spiritual region. “Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the infinite relish of this ‘prodigal son’ of Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see! listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the Lord God literally everywhere!—here was the final counsel of perfection.” What repels Gaston in the teaching of Bruno is the want of artistic distinction and refinement about his theory. The instinct of the artist was just that—to define, disentangle, discern, to distinguish between “the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and wrong in the matter of art.”