He treats of Pascal from the literary side, with a whole-hearted admiration. He says that he made the French language “as if by a new creation, what it has remained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.” He dwells on the fragrant charm, the naturalness, of the _Letters_, proceeding from one who was hardly a student, knowing but two or three great books. And the _Pensées_ he considers to be pure inspirations “penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark.” How could the _Pensées_ be more nobly summarised than as “those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet”? They seem to him to combine faultless expression, perfect economy of statement, marvellous suggestiveness, with a “somewhat Satanic intimacy” with the weaknesses of the human heart. What kept Pascal from scepticism, or, rather, what threw him into religion, was a bewildered, a terrified apprehension of the strange inconsistency of human nature, the blending of meanness and greatness which everywhere appears. We may consider this essay, then, as Pater’s most deliberate utterance on ethical things. It reveals him, I think, as a deep though unwilling sceptic; it shows a soul athirst yet unsatisfied; it shows that the region of beauty, both in art and religion, in which he strove to live, was but an outer paradise in which he found what peace he could; but in the innermost shrine all is dark and still. On leaving London, Pater had settled, in 1893, in a house in St. Giles’, Oxford. It is a quiet house with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left is a little passage leading to the back of the house. The inner arch is surmounted with a quaint carved face. Here he settled with his sisters in great contentment. The President of Magdalen, Mr. T. H. Warren, speaking of the later Oxford days, writes:— “One would have said that there was a kind of placid piety, an inner content, which somehow manifested itself in him. He did not talk a great deal, yet always enough. What I think struck me most about him was a sort of gentleness in his whole manner, in perception and predilection, almost at times a softness,—and yet it was balanced by hardness of decision too. He was a very familiar figure, with his pale face, strong jaw, heavy, chopped, German-looking moustache, tall hat and apple-green tie. He was often seen walking, and latterly he rather laboured in his walk, which gave, rightly or wrongly, the idea of conscious or half-conscious suffering.... At the Dante Society he did not say much, but what always struck me was that he spoke with a certain authority and a strong common sense; and, moreover, with what appeared a personal and natural knowledge of what a poet or a literary artist in his temperament and habits really is....