be seen in gregarious resorts; he would linger about them, expressing his indignation, yet always ending by contributing liberally to their maintenance. In conversation, especially in earlier days, Pater adopted a consistent and deliberate irony of speech which was such as often to baffle even his intimate friends. He delighted in paradox, and in a kind of whimsical perversity. He would dwell upon the unessential attributes of a scene, a personality, a book, when a serious judgment was desired. And this, combined as it was with a serious, grave, and almost gloomy manner, completed the mystification. He was fond, as I have said, of insisting upon some altogether unimportant detail on these occasions; he used to pretend that he shut his eyes in crossing Switzerland, on his journeys to and from Italy, so as not to see the “horrid pots of blue paint,” as he called the Swiss lakes. He would profess himself unable to read the books of a person whose name or personal appearance distressed him. The celebrated story, which is widely current about him as to the examination in which he took a part, is characteristic of the same mood. He was supposed to have looked over a paper, but when the examiners met he seemed to have kept no record of his impressions; to assist his recollection the names of the candidates were read over, but he seemed to be unable to connect any ideas with any of them until the name Sanctuary appeared, at which he visibly brightened, and said that he was now sure he had looked over the papers because he remembered that he liked the name. Probably the habit arose from the fact that he was of a shy and sensitive temperament, and that to give a real and serious opinion was a trial to him. He disliked the possibility of dissent or disapproval, and took refuge in this habit of irony, so as to baffle his hearers and erect a sort of fence between them and his own personality. But partly too he was undoubtedly aware, in his earlier days, that the expectation of conversational _friandises_ amused and delighted his hearers. He was rather the spoilt child of the intellectual circle in which he lived, and it is held by some that he rather presumed on the indulgence of his friends in this respect. Mr. Basil Champneys, for instance, recollects how he was dining in company with Pater at Professor Bywater’s, about the year 1875, with a small party. The conversation turned on George Eliot, and Pater announced that he did not think much of George Eliot as a writer. “It is impossible,” he said, “to value a writer all of whose characters are practically identical. What,” he said, “is Maggie Tulliver but Tito in petticoats?” Such a criticism is of course purely perverse, and contains no germ of critical seriousness.