“It seemed to me that he cultivated a wise, grave passiveness, a gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability; that he tried to keep, and did keep, a sort of _bloom_ upon his mind. I never remember a single unkind criticism or remark.... My opinion of him is rather an impression than an opinion, and that is, I think, what he would himself have wished—and what is fairest too. “Can I put it in a few words? He expressed life for himself and to others in terms of sensations, of impressions. These he might analyse, combine, and re-combine, but together they formed his working synthesis. I did not really know him in the earlier days, when in his written work the sensuousness and the referability of everything to sensation was so avowed. I only knew him well much later when he had become a kind of quietist: what the real man was I could not say.” In the spring of 1894 Pater went to Glasgow to receive the honorary degree of LL.D., a little piece of recognition which pleased him, and took the opportunity of visiting some of the Northern Cathedrals. In the summer of the same year he was for the first time in his life seriously ill. He had an attack of rheumatic fever and was confined to his bed. But he made an apparent recovery, and became convalescent. He was allowed to leave his bed and come downstairs. He was full of cheerfulness and interest, though he was feeling weak; it is certain, however, that there was something organically wrong, though he allowed himself, with the instinct of one who enjoyed the ordinary routine of life to the full, and who was impatient of invalid conditions, to resume his activities too soon. Still there seemed no reason to suppose that he was acting imprudently. He was working at the lecture on Pascal, which was to have been delivered in July, when, in consequence of writing too near to an open window, he had an attack of pleurisy, which still further reduced his strength. Again he became convalescent, and left his room on July 29 without ill effects. But on the morning of Monday, July 30, 1894, at ten o’clock, on coming downstairs, he had a sudden attack of heart failure, and died apparently without suffering. If he had lived five days longer he would have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was buried in the Holywell cemetery at Oxford, in the presence of many of his old friends. It is melancholy to feel that in all probability his life might have been prolonged for some years, if he had but realised how much reduced in strength he was. But it was the happiest kind of end that could befall a man of Pater’s sensitive and apprehensive temperament. He had always, from his earliest years, been much preoccupied with the thought of death, and even with the effort to reconcile himself to it. It was strange and beautiful that it should, after all, have befallen him so quietly and simply. He felt no shadow of death, no mournful forebodings of mortality.