Again, though the following is probably to be regarded as legendary, it is said that he once, in a lecture, announced that in certain aspects we might be justified in regarding religion as a beautiful disease. This remark was quoted by an undergraduate to his parent with the substitution of the word “loathsome” for “beautiful.” The parent wrote indignantly to Pater to ask if it was right that such opinions should be expressed by a tutor to undergraduates. Pater, according to his own account, replied that he did not think he could have used the word “loathsome.” He might, he said, have used the word “beautiful”—“a beautiful disease.” “The parent,” he added, “expressed himself entirely reassured and satisfied by the explanation.”[3] [3] The origin of this story is no doubt to be found on page 217 of the 1889 edition of the _Appreciations_, in the suppressed essay on “Aesthetic Poetry.” “That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses.” He went to see a rather elderly game of hockey played by middle-aged performers, and, after a moment of silence, said softly to his companion: “Come away; I think we ought to go on; it seems hardly fair to look at them.” But the habit of indulging in ironical or reckless paradox had its dangerous side. There was at Oxford in the days of Pater’s early residence a certain aesthetic movement, a species of renaissance, in which the creed of beauty was strongly insisted upon. In some members of the circle that was thus affected, this resulted in much extravagance of thought; and in some it had even worse results in loosening the principles of morality, and judging action by the canons of what was held to be beautiful. It is a difficult subject to treat discreetly, because the _epigoni_ of the school, in certain notorious instances, ended in complete moral and social shipwreck. With the extravagances and excesses of the school it is needless to say that Pater, a man of scrupulous conscience and a high standard of moral delicacy, had not the slightest sympathy; but his love of paradox, his recklessness of irony, unquestionably led him to say things which could be unhappily distorted and misapplied, and which, not in his own case, but in the case of those who heard and exaggerated them, were capable of being construed in a serious light, and the utterance of which may be said to have justified both anxiety and distress. Here, as elsewhere, the true Pater is to be seen in his writings, and not in his ironical _dicta_. And any careful student of his deliberate thoughts finds no difficulty in discerning the delicacy and the loftiness of his view. He refused, it is true, to take a conventional view of the principles of art; but though the essential purity of art can be distorted into a wild appetite for beautiful impressions and sensual experience, it can yet be safeguarded and kept in a high and austere