The work of writing grew easier to him as time went on. “Ah! it is much easier now,” he said to Mr. Gosse, near the end of his life. “If I live long enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing.” He was a regular rather than a hard worker. It was his habit for many years to devote two or three hours of the morning to writing, and he often wrote again for another hour in the afternoon. But he never worked late at night; writing was to him an absorbing and at the same time a fatiguing process, to be pursued temperately and quietly. Some writers work for a time as though possessed, fall into a profound exhaustion when a book is finished, and then lie fallow for a time. Such was never Pater’s way. His writing was his central concern; he loved it with an ever-growing love; it formed the staple employment of his days; but his friends say that there never was a man who seemed to be always so free from preoccupation, so ready to put his work aside, and enter into conversation of the most trivial kind; there were no furtive glances at the clock, none of the air of jealous if patient resignation, no hunted sense of the desire to escape from interruption. Again, too much emphasis has been laid upon the conscious fatigue and exhaustion arising from his work. He was not, like Flaubert, the racked and tortured medium of his thought. He was a man of low physical vitality, and he would sometimes half-humorously lament the labour that his work cost him. But the toil and the delight were inextricably intermingled; such writing as Pater’s with its subtle distinctions, its fine metaphors, its delicate effects, its haunted richness, its remote images, its liquid cadences, could never have been produced except by one who tasted to the full the artistic pleasure of elaborate workmanship. And it is beyond all doubt that his work became to him in increasing measure the mainspring of his life, a spring of the purest joy. One source of his concentrated strength was that he never wasted time in experimental researches; he knew his own mind; he knew exactly what interested him and the limitations of his taste; thus he confined his ideals to a restricted circle, and though perhaps losing somewhat in catholicity of thought, he gained astonishing depth and insight in certain specified directions. But he made no parade of omniscience. He used to say smilingly that it was such a relief to work hard at a subject and then forget all about it.