His habits were marked by the same ascetic simplicity. He never took afternoon tea, he never smoked. His meals were plain to austerity. But he took great pains with the little entertainments he gave, ordering every item and writing the menu-cards himself. The morning, he used to say, was the time for creation, the afternoon for correction. He did very little work in the evening. His habits were absolutely regular; few days were without their tale of quiet study. He concerned himself very little with college matters, though he held various college offices; he was at one time Tutor and at the end of his life Dean. He lectured to the passmen, and later gave public lectures, of which the volume _Plato and Platonism_ was the fruit. One of his friends remembers attending these lectures: a number of undergraduates arrived, spread out their notebooks and prepared to take notes; but the attempt was soon abandoned, the lecturer reading, slowly and continuously, in a soft mellow voice, one carefully turned phrase after another. Mr. Humphry Ward writes:— “Then, I suppose about May 1867, came his first lectures. Only six or eight Brasenose men were then reading for classical Greats; the system of ‘combined’ college lectures, to which afterwards Pater owed the large audiences that came to hear him on Plato, was not yet invented. We were six men, some novices, some dull, all quite unprepared for Pater. He sat down and began—it was the ‘History of Philosophy.’ We expected the old formulae about Thales, and some references to Aristotle that we could take down in our books and use for the Schools. It was nothing of the kind. It was a quickly delivered discourse, rather Comtian, on the Dogmatic and Historical methods: quite new to me, and worse than new to some others. I remember, as we went out, a senior man, F——, who used to amaze us by his ready translations of Thucydides in ‘Mods’ lectures, and who passed as extremely clever—as he was in that line—F. threw down his note-book with the cry, ‘No more of that for me: if Greats mean _that_, I’ll cut ’em!’ (as he wisely did).” Among Pater’s chief friends were, in early days, Professor Ingram Bywater, his contemporary at Queen’s, Dr. Edward Caird, now Master of Balliol, Professor Nettleship, Mr. W. W. Capes, tutor of Queen’s; but his closest friend and lifelong companion was Mr. C. L. Shadwell, then of Christ Church, now Provost of Oriel, who had been for a short time his private pupil. Pater often travelled in his company, and on Pater’s death he undertook to act as his literary executor, a task which he has fulfilled with a rare loyalty and discretion.