It is not clear then how the doctrine of Bruno or even of Montaigne was to affect the spirit of Gaston. It is a case of a soul the very breath of whose life was the arriving at canons of some kind, whose most sacred duty appeared to be to select from the immense mass of experience and material flung so prodigally down in the world, the things that belonged to his peace. The difficulty is to comprehend what was to be the issue. In the theory of Montaigne and Bruno alike, Gaston is brought into contact with types essentially uncritical, and one would suppose that they were intended to have an enlarging effect. But the hint seems rather to be that they were to act in the opposite direction, and to throw Gaston back upon the critical attitude, as the one safeguard in the bewildering world. One feels as though Pater had here essayed too large a task; that he was, so to speak, preaching to himself the doctrine of robust tolerance, of good-humoured sympathy with a more vivid and generous life; and that he could not to his satisfaction depict the next steps in the development because it was precisely the very type of development of which he had had no personal experience. Thus the book, from its very incompleteness, has the interest of being again an intimate self-revelation. It stands like a great unfinished canvas by a master of minute, imaginative, suggestive portraiture. Only, one is tempted to wish that he had not given so much thought and energy to so baffling a task—that he had constructed more of those solitary figures which he had, as we know, in his mind, in which his powers would have had their full scope, in which every delicate touch would have told. After the publication of the five chapters of _Gaston de Latour_, Pater gave himself up to the composition of one of the most interesting of all his productions. The essay on “Style,” which appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ of December 1888, and was prefixed to _Appreciations_ in 1889, is one of Pater’s most elaborate and finished productions. It is indeed so elaborate, so carefully wrought, it disdains so solemnly the devices that bring lucidity, the way-posts and milestones of the road, that in reading it one is apt to lose the sense of its structure, and not to realise what a simple case he is presenting. Professor Seeley used to enunciate the maxim to those whose essays he was criticising, “Let the bones show!” Well, in Pater’s essay the bones do not show; not only does the rounded flesh conceal them, but they are still further disguised into a species of pontifical splendour by a rich and stiff embroidered robe of language.