He shows the mental force of Raphael’s conceptions, his unequalled power of apprehending and transmitting to others complex and difficult ideas with a real philosophical grasp, yet for all his technique, all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge, never losing sight of essential beauty and peace. Pater instances as the supremely salient instance of his art the Ansidei or Blenheim Madonna, now in the National Gallery. It is not impossible that he was guided in this selection by a consideration for those whose opportunities for acquainting themselves with Raphael’s art were bound to be limited. “I find there,” he says, “at first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding, in the economy with which he has reduced his material to the simplest terms, has disentangled and detached its various elements.” “Keep them to that picture,” he adds, “as the embodied formula of Raphael’s genius.” The conclusion of the essay comes rather suddenly, and he sums up the purpose of Raphael’s life in the phrase, “I am utterly purposed that I will not offend.” It is this balance of temperament, this steady deliberate bias to perfect purity, that is the note of his life. He is the Galahad of art, and might say with Galahad— “My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.” The essay is thus a careful and sympathetic attempt to give to learners a lucid introduction to the art of Raphael. But it differs from his own chosen subjects, and is therefore less characteristic of Pater as a writer than much of his work—in that there is no attempt at tracing the recondite, the suggestive element, in the work of Raphael. He intermingles little of his own preference, his own personality, with the verdict; but it is still deeply characteristic of Pater in another region of his mind, of the patient sympathy which he was always ready to give, of his desire to meet others halfway, not to mystify or to bewilder the half-cultivated learner, whose zeal perhaps may outrun his critical knowledge, with more remote considerations, but to draw the rays into a single bright focus, rather than, as Pater so often did, resolve the single ray into rainbow tints and prismatic refractions. Here, then, at least, we see Pater in the light of the educator, the scribe, the expounder of mysteries, rather than as the hieratic presenter of the deeper symbol. _Plato and Platonism_, certain chapters of which appeared in 1892, was eventually published in 1893, and thus was the main and serious occupation of Pater’s last years. He placed the book at the head of his own writings. A friend once asked him whether he thought that _The Renaissance_ or _Marius_ was his best book. “Oh, no,” he said, “neither. If there is anything of mine that has a chance of surviving, I should say it was my _Plato_.”