It is a fine piece of critical analysis, perhaps a little overstated, but essentially true. Mérimée does not succeed quite to the extent that Pater thinks in absolute self-effacement, but he has seen clearly enough the spirit of the man; and though his exposition marches somewhat relentlessly on, discarding such evidence as may tell against his theory, yet he has somehow penetrated the secret of this brilliant writer with his flawless polish, his inner hardness, as only a great critic can. Of the delivery of this lecture on Mérimée, the President of Magdalen says:— “A large audience, too large for the ugly and inconvenient Lecture Room at the Taylorian, came to hear him. He seemed surprised and overwhelmed. I don’t think he knew how much of a celebrity he was, and he seemed a little frightened. He read his lecture in a low monotonous voice.” In the same year appeared the “Art Notes in North Italy.” It is what it professes to be, a little study of certain Italian painters, jottings from an artistic traveller’s diary, and deserves no special consideration, excepting in so far as it reveals Pater’s preferences and his method. In 1892, besides the first chapters of _Plato and Platonism_, and an ingenious and beautiful essay on the study of Dante, written as an introduction to Mr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of the _Purgatory_, Pater published, in successive numbers of the _New Review_, “Emerald Uthwart,” which has been considered among the _Imaginary Portraits_. In the same year the essay on “Raphael” was written, as a lecture, and it thus differs in style to a certain extent from the more deliberate literary works, though less, perhaps, in the case of Pater than would be the case with many writers. But he certainly aimed at producing something which should be capable of being apprehended by an interested listener on a first hearing; there is less concentration, less ornament, less economy of effect, than in the more deliberate writings. The essay presupposes a certain knowledge of the subject, and aims at bringing out the central motif of the life of the great painter relieved against a somewhat shadowy and allusive background of events. But the central thought is not lacking in clearness.