has all been employed; not by elaborately amplifying detail, but by condensing an abundance of scattered points into a single illuminating hint, a poignant image, an apt illustration. He was entirely remote from those easy superficial writers who generalise from insufficient premises, and bridge the gaps in their knowledge by graceful fabrics of words. All Pater’s work was strongly focussed; he drew the wandering and scattered rays, as through a crystal lens, into a burning and convergent point of light. Not to travel far for instances, the essay on Leonardo is a perfect example of this. The writing is so delicate, so apparently fanciful, that it is only through a careful study of the available tradition that one comes to realise how minute is the knowledge that furnishes out these gemmed and luminous sentences. It is true that his knowledge is not pedantically applied, that he concerns himself little with minute and technical questions of art-criticism; but I conceive that Pater’s attempt was always to discern the inner beauty, the essence of the thing; to disentangle the personality, the humanity of the artist, rather than to classify or analyse the work. And so it comes about that his art-criticism is essentially a creative thing, that adds little to the historical aspect of the development of art, and falls indeed at times into positive error; the training, the severe observation, the cultivated instinct, is there, but it is relegated, so to speak, to an ante-room, while the spirit is led to apprehend something of the mysterious issues of art, initiated into the secret appreciation of beauty, and drawn to worship in the darkened innermost shrine. There is always something holy, even priestly, about Pater’s attitude to art. It insists upon the initial critical training, the necessity of ordered knowledge; but it leaves this far behind; it passes beyond the nice apprehension of eye, the cultivated sense of line and colour, the exact discrimination of style and medium, into a remote and poetical region. Such secrets cannot be explained or even analysed; they cannot be communicated to those that are without; they must be emotionally and mystically apprehended, by the soul rather than by the mind. It was this secret vision, this inner enlightening, on which Pater had set his heart, and which he sought for urgently and diligently. He loved the symbol, not for itself alone, but for the majesty which it contained, the hidden light which it guarded. It is in this region alone that he seems to wear an absorbed and pontifical air, not with the false sacerdotal desire to enhance personal impressiveness and private dignity, through the ministry of divine powers and holy secrets, but with the unconscious emotion of one whose eyes behold great wonders enacting themselves upon the bodiless air, which the dull and the contemptuous may not discern.