It is a curious fact that Pater showed no precocious signs, in boyhood and youth, of a desire to write. Those in whose blood stirs the creative impulse, the literary energy, feel the thrill as a rule very early, and cover paper diligently from their first years. But Pater’s family cannot remember that he ever showed any particular tendency to write. He never wrote poetry in childhood, except a few humorous verses, long lost and forgotten; later on he made some verse-translations from Goethe, Alfred de Musset, and the Greek Anthology; and this abstention from the composition of verse is a remarkable fact in the case of one whose prose is so essentially poetical. It is common to differentiate the prose of poets, as in the case of Dryden, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and others, from the prose of those who have never attempted to write in verse; it is thought that it has a greater precision, a sonorous richness, a more vivid colouring. If Pater had ever practised the art of poetry, it would be easy to point to his prose as a supreme instance of these qualities, because, quite apart from its luxurious prodigality, both of epithet and image, it has a strong, rhythmical, almost metrical movement in places. But, as a matter of fact, his chief characteristics, as a prose-writer, came to him late. As a rule, the makers of gorgeous and exquisite prose have begun by erring on the side of diffuseness and ornament, and have chastened their style into due proportion and lucidity. But Pater’s earliest writings, which seem to have been essays for Societies, have none of the later charm; they tend to be austere, hard, and even dry. Neither did he arrive at his plentiful and magnificent vocabulary, as some writers have done, by the production of large masses of writing that never see the light, in which their hand has learned firmness of outline, and their teeming brain the power of summoning the supremely appropriate word from a suspended cloud of more or less suitable language. His method was far otherwise. At one time he applied himself daily for some months to translating a page of Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert, and this seems to have been his only exercise. His prose steadily grew in volume and depth; and the one serious fault of his writing, the tendency that his sentences have to become long and involved, did not diminish. What he did gain as years went on was a refined and surprising power over words, a power of condensing an elaborate effect into a single haunting sentence which suggests rather than reveals. His work was always the result of much patient and unseen labour; but though he revised carefully and jealously enough in many cases, his richness was not derived in reality so much from these stippled effects, as from the fulness of mind out of which he wrote. Any one who has ever gone over the same ground as Pater, and studied the same authorities, will be amazed to find how conscientiously and diligently the material