In “Pico della Mirandola” he traces the attempt to reconcile the principles of Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece, not by any historical or philosophical method, but by allegorical interpretation, in the spirit of that “generous belief that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality.” He dwells with wistful delight upon the figure of this graceful and precocious scholar, Pico, “Earl of Mirandola, and a great Lord of Italy”—Pico, nurtured in the law, but restless and athirst, with the eager and uncritical zest of the time, for philosophy, for language, for religion, working, fitfully and brilliantly, in the hope that some solution would be found to satisfy the yearnings of the soul, some marvellous secret, which would in a moment gratify and harmonise all curious and warring impulses. Pico, beloved of women, seemly and gracious of mien, dying of fever at so early an age, and lying down for his last rest in the grave habit of the Dominicans, mystical, ardent, weary with the weariness that comes of so swift and perilous a pilgrimage, is a type of beauty shadowed by doom, mortality undimmed by age or disease, that appealed with passionate force to Pater’s mind. In the essay on “Sandro Botticelli” he touches on the meditative subtlety, the visionary melancholy of the painter, “the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss about them—the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.” He traces the strange mixture of idealism and realism which transfuses Botticelli’s pictures, his men and women, “clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy.” He confesses frankly that Botticelli displays an incomplete grasp of the resources of art; but he indicates with subtle perception the haunted and wistful spirit of the artist. In the “Luca della Robbia” Pater traces very skilfully the attempt made to unite the pleasure derivable from sculpture with the homely art of pottery, the old-world modesty and seriousness and simplicity which put out its strength to adorn and cultivate daily household life; and he shows, too, the exquisite _intimité_ and the originality of the man, which is so rarely exhibited in the white abstract art of sculpture. The _motif_ of the “Poetry of Michelangelo” is best summed up in the words which Pater uses as a recurrent phrase: _ex forti dulcedo_—out of the strong came forth sweetness. He says:—