Thus Plato, according to Pater, is an advocate of the _immutable_, of law and principle. “Change is the irresistible law of our being.... Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being.” He shows that Plato was by constitution an emphatically sensuous nature, deeply sensible to impressions of beauty, and to emotional relations with others; but that he regarded the appeal of the senses as a species of moral education; that the philosophical learner passed from the particular to the general, from the love of precise and personal beauty, to the love of the central and inner beauty. And thus Plato is not so much a teacher as a noble and inspiriting comrade; those who love Plato do not sit at his feet and absorb his wisdom, but take service with him in his adventurous band, journeying from the familiar scene and the beloved home to the remote and distant mountains that close the horizon, but from which there may be a prospect of hidden lands. The whole book cannot be held to be exactly characteristic of Pater’s deliberate style. It is composed not so much to embody his own dreams as to make a personality, an age, a spirit, clear to younger minds; but there is a sense of a delighted zest, a blithe freedom about it, as though it were the work of a mind which had escaped from tyrannical impulses and uneasy questionings into a gentle tranquillity of thought. One feels that not only is the subject dear to him, but that those whom he would address are also dear; there is thus an affectionate solicitude, a buoyant easiness, about the book, as of a master speaking simply and unconstrainedly among a band of eager and friendly pupils. The book is full of echoes out of a well-filled mind, of Augustine and Dante, of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Not only Plato himself, but the other incidental figures are brilliantly touched. Socrates, himself “rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop,” yet “everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what _is_, what is _true_—as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know”; or Pythagoras, that distant legendary figure, with his strange glimpses of pre-existence, emerging as a brilliant, perhaps showy, personality, a mysterious or mystical thaumaturge,—these are sharply and definitely conceived.