Again, there is a beautiful chapter on Lacedaemon, and the decorous, ordered, submissive system of the Dorians, which presented so strong a contrast to the diffuse, unregulated, brilliant spirit of Ionian communities. The Spartan theory of education, with its resemblance to our own English system, developing the individual only in order to subordinate him to the common welfare, repressing all eclectic, all independent qualities, had a potent attraction for Pater’s mind, the attraction that all systems have that promise tranquillity and settled instincts as a reward for obedience, for a mind that desires guidance, and to whom personal freedom has brought more anxiety than serenity. The high value of this chapter is that it contrives to invest a system which, barely and unsympathetically described, appears to be ineffably dreary and unpicturesque, with the charm of cheerfulness and quietness so characteristic of communities of a monastic order, a cheerfulness which comes from the removal of personal responsibility, and the substitution of unquestioning obedience—that highest of all luxuries for indecisive and sensitive characters. The book, then, is a beautiful thing, with a sense of recovered youth blending with an older wisdom about it; a book admirably fitted to attract and instruct an ingenuous mind; but lucid, interesting, and gracious as it is, Pater does not here emerge as the _parfait prosateur_, as Bourget called him; it was no doubt the delight of feeling that in this book he had conferred a real educational benefit upon those youthful spirits to whom his heart went out, that made him rate the book so highly. He did not feel so sure whither the artistic reveries, the metaphysical speculations, of his other works might conduct them; but, for all that, criticism is right in setting a higher value upon his more intimate self-revelations, upon the books in which he uttered oracles, rather than on the book where he furthered knowledge. In the last year of Pater’s life he published one of the _Greek Studies_—“The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” which we have already considered, and two little sketches of travel—“Some Great Churches in France,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in March and June of that year. “Notre-Dame d’Amiens” is a fine study of a great church, dwelling on the lightness, the brightness, the “immense cheerfulness,” of the building. The only very noteworthy passage is one in which he contrasts Greek and Gothic architecture. He says that in Gothic art “for the mere _melody_ of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got _harmony_, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same moment; and were gainers” ... “the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence, of the Catholic religion.”