And the second point, which is allied closely to this, is that Pater presses too heavily upon laboriousness in art at the expense of ecstatic freedom; because though there are among the greatest artists many instances of those who have attained supremacy by endless and painstaking labour, yet, in the case of the best artists of all, they seem to start at a point to which others may hardly attain, to be more like the inheritors of perfect faculty than the laborious acquirers of it. Writers like Scott and Thackeray, for instance, not to travel far for instances, seem to have achieved, as Scott himself said, their best results by a “hurried frankness” of execution, and to have produced by a kind of instinct what others have to learn to produce by toil and thought. And thus it is that the essay, in its very incompleteness and partiality of view, has an immense value as an autobiographical document, and helps us, if it is the personality of Pater that we desire to apprehend and penetrate, to draw closer to the real man, in his strength and in his limitations, than any other extant writing; and is indeed a piece of intimate self-revelation. Moreover, the concluding paragraphs of the essay, the frank confession of his belief, in words which his natural reticence make into what may be carelessly regarded as a piece of tame and conventional rhetoric, in the ultimate mission of art, have an intense and vital significance; the increase of sympathy, the amelioration of suffering, the service of humanity—these, then, were in his deliberate view the ends of art. The very use, in the very crucial passage of the summary, of the vague and trite phrase “the glory of God” as a motive for high art, has a poignant emphasis: it reveals the very depth of the writer’s soul. He of all men, at the very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could never have used such an expression unless it contained for him an essential truth; and this single phrase bears eloquent testimony to the fact that, below the aesthetic doctrine which he enunciated, lay an ethical base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and obedience to the Creator and Father of men.