It is stated in biographical notices of Pater that for some generations the sons of the family had been brought up as Catholics, the daughters as Anglicans. But this has been too much insisted upon; as a matter of fact the Roman Catholicism in the family was of late date. Walter Pater’s great-grandfather was a convert, having married a lady of great piety and sweetness, whose mother’s maiden name was Gage, belonging to an old Roman Catholic family in Suffolk. Richard Pater, Walter’s father, quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, and adopted no particular form of faith; and Walter Pater was brought up as an Anglican. At the age of fourteen the boy was sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, where he seems to have been regarded at first as idle and backward; but he was popular in spite of an entire indifference to games. Not till he entered the sixth form did his intellectual ambition awaken. It would be interesting to know something of the thoughts of this grave, silent, and friendly boy through the impressionable years; but, like many boys of ability, he was affected by a sensitive shyness, a reticence about his inner thoughts. Cheerful, lively, chattering children, who too often, alas! degenerate into the bores of later life, can generally talk easily and unaffectedly about their tastes and interests, and blithely reveal the slender sparkling stream of their thoughts. But with boys of perceptive and meditative temperaments it is mostly far otherwise. They find themselves overmastered by feelings which they cannot express, and which they are ashamed of trying to express for fear of being thought eccentric. Pater was always apt to be reticent about his own interior feelings, and confided them only to the more impersonal medium of his writings. He had no taste at any time for indulging in reminiscence, and tended rather to be the recipient of other people’s thoughts, which he welcomed and interpreted with ready sympathy, than to be garrulous about the details of his own life, which, with characteristic humility, he was disposed to consider destitute of interest. But one trait of character does undoubtedly emerge. He was instinctively inclined to a taste for symbolical ceremony of every kind. In the family circle he was fond of organising little processional pomps, in which the children were to move with decorous solemnity. He looked forward to taking orders in the Church of England; and this bias was strengthened by a visit he paid, as a little boy, to a house of some friends at Hursley. There he met Keble, who had a great devotion to children. Keble took a fancy to the quiet serious child, walked with him, and spoke with him of the religious life, in a way that made a deep impression on the boy’s mind, though they never met again.