_The Studies in the History of the Renaissance_ deserve close attention, in the first place for themselves, because of the elaborateness of the art displayed, the critical subtlety with which typical qualities are seized and interpreted. As the bee ranges over flowers at will, and gathers a tiny draught of honey from each, which, though appropriated, secreted, and reproduced, still bears the flavor of the particular flower, whether of the garden violet or the wild heather-bell, from which it was drawn, so these essays exhibit each a characteristic savour of the art or the figure which furnished them. They are no shallow or facile impressions, but bear the marks of resolute compression and fine selection. But they are not mere forms reflected in the mirror of a perceptive mind. They are in the truest sense symbolical, charged to the brim with the personality of the writer, and thus to be ranged with creative rather than critical art. Those who cannot see with Pater’s eyes may look in vain, in the writings or the pictures of which he speaks, for the mysterious suggestiveness of line and colour which he discerns in them. They have suffered in passing through the medium of his perception, like the bones of the drowned king, “a sea-change into something rich and strange”; they are like the face which he describes, into which the soul with all its maladies had passed. It is hardly for us to estimate the ethical significance of the attitude revealed. It must suffice to say that in the hands of Pater these pictures out of the past have been transmuted by a secret and deep current of emotion into something behind and beyond the outer form. They are charged with dreams. And in the second place they reveal, perhaps, the sincerest emotions of a mind at its freshest and strongest. No considerations of prudence or discretion influenced his thought. Pew writers perhaps preserve, through fame and misunderstanding alike, so consistent, so individual an attitude as Pater. But it must also be borne in mind that he was deeply sensitive, and though he was deliberately and instinctively sincere in all his work, yet in his later writings one feels that criticism and even misrepresentation had an effect upon him. He realised that there were certain veins of thought that were not convenient; that the frank enunciation of principles evoked impatience and even suspicion in the sturdy and breezy English mind. He held on his way indeed, though with a certain sadness. But there is no touch of that outer sadness in these first delicate and fanciful creations; the sadness that breathes through them is the inner sadness, the veiled melancholy that makes her sovereign shrine in the very temple of delight. Here, too, may be seen the impassioned joy that is born of the shock of exquisite impressions coming home to a nature that is widening and deepening every hour.