After disentangling himself from metaphysical speculations, after what may be called his artistic conversion, which dates from his first journey to Italy, he threw himself with intense concentration into the task of developing his power of expression. Thus his first deliberate work is a species of manifesto, an enunciation of the principles with which he began his artistic pilgrimage. The interest of the study “Winckelmann” is very great. It has been made the subject of a myth, the legend being that it was written while Pater was a boy at school. This statement, which is wholly without foundation, is only worth mentioning in order that it may be contradicted. The origin of the story is probably to be found in the desire to make Pater’s boyhood prophetic of his later interests; but the study was as a matter of fact written in 1866. It appeared in January 1867, in the _Westminster Review_. There is a charm about the early work of writers whose style is strongly individual. Sometimes these early attempts are tentative and unequal, as if the writer had not yet settled down to a deliberate style; they bear traces of the effect of other favourite styles. The curtain seems to rise, so to speak, jerkily, and to reveal the performer by glimpses; but in the case of the “Winckelmann” the curtain goes up tranquilly and evenly, and the real Pater steps quietly upon the stage. The style in which “Winckelmann” is written is a formed style; it contains all the characteristics which give Pater his unique distinction. It is closely and elaborately packed; the sentences have the long stately cadences; the epithets have the _soigneux_ flavour; and it is full, too, of those delicate and suggestive passages, where a beautiful image is hinted, with a severe economy of art, rather than worked out in the Ruskinian fashion. There is, too, a rigid suppression of the ornamental; it is like gold from which the encompassing gravel has been washed. But it has also a passion, a glow, which is somewhat in contrast to a certain sense of weariness that creeps into some of the later work. It is youthful, ardent, indiscreet. But for all that it is accurately proportioned and mature. It shows the power, which is very characteristic of Pater, of condensing an exact knowledge of detail into a few paragraphs, retaining what is salient and illuminating, and giving the effect of careful selection. It is plain, in the “Winckelmann,” that the writer had been hitherto occupied in somewhat experimental researches; but here he seems to have found his own point of view in a moment, and to have suddenly apprehended his attitude to the world. It is as when a carrier-pigeon released from its prison beats round and round, determining by some mysterious instinct the direction of its home; and at last sweeps off, without doubt or hesitation, with steady strokes on the chosen path.