The preface of the book strikes a firm note of personality. Pater is here seen to be in strong revolt against the synthetic school of art-criticism. The business of the aesthetic critic, he declares with solemn earnestness, is not to attempt a definition of abstract beauty, but to realise the relativity of beauty, and to discern the quality, the virtue, of the best art of a writer or an artist. He explains too his principle of selection, namely that while the interest of the Renaissance is centred in Italy, its outer ripples, so to speak, must be studied in French poetry as well as in the later German manifestations of the same spirit. There is an interesting passage, in the recent memoir of Lady Dilke, about Pater’s _Renaissance_. It will be remembered that when the book appeared she was the wife of Mark Pattison. She was then much engaged in the practice of art-criticism, and reviewed the book with some severity, as lacking in scientific exactness and in historical perspective. She thought that Pater had isolated the movement from its natural origins, and complained that he had treated the Renaissance as “an air-plant, independent of the ordinary sources of nourishment ... a sentimental revolution having no relation to the actual conditions of the world.” This criticism has a certain truth in it, and gains interest from the fact that it probably to a certain extent represents the mature judgment of Pattison himself. But it is based on a misconception of the scope of the book, and is sufficiently rebutted by the modest title of the volume, _Studies in the History of the Renaissance_. The book, indeed, lays no claim to be an exhaustive treatment of the movement. It is only a poetical and suggestive interpretation of certain brilliant episodes, springing from deeper causes which Pater made no attempt to indicate. In the first essay, “Aucassin and Nicolette,” he points out that the sweetness of the Renaissance is not only derived from the classical world, but from the native outpouring of the spirit which showed itself in ecclesiastical art and in native French poetry, and which prompted and prepared the way for the enthusiastic return to classical art.