Winckelmann was one who, after a dark and poverty-stricken youth, of mental and indeed physical starvation, became aware of the perfect beauty of Greek art, and renounced all study but that of the literature of the arts, till he became “consummate, tranquil, withdrawn into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life.” He renounced his metaphysical and legal studies, in which he had made progress. He joined the Church of Rome, to gain the patronage of the Saxon Court; and finally transferred himself to Rome, where he wrote his _History of Ancient Art_. He lived a life of severe simplicity, absorbed entirely in intellectual and artistic study, his only connection with the world in which he lived being a series of romantic and almost passionate friendships. His end was tragic; for he was murdered by a fellow-traveller at Trieste for the sake of some gold medals which he had received at Vienna. Goethe, whose intellectual ideal had been deeply affected by Winckelmann’s writings, was awaiting his arrival at Leipsic with intense enthusiasm, but was not destined ever to see him. Such was the figure that appealed so strongly to Pater’s mind; and perhaps the chief interest of the essay is the strong autobiographical element that appears in it. Pater saw in Winckelmann a type of himself, of his own intellectual struggles, of his own conversion to the influence of art. After a confused and blinded youth, self-contained and meagrely nourished, Winckelmann had struck out, without hesitation or uneasy lingering, on his path among the stars. It is impossible not to feel in many passages that Pater is reading his own soul-history into that of his hero. “It is easy,” he writes, “to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.” And again:—