Not that Pater withdrew the “Conclusion,” because he mistrusted his own principles; such principles as he held would tend to the refinement and enlargement of the moral nature, by multiplying relationships, by substituting sympathy for conscience, by admitting to the full the loftier religious influences; and thus the self-absorption of the artist would insensibly give place to a wider, more altruistic absorption. But Pater felt, no doubt, that having struck a sensuous note in his essays, this statement of principles of artistic axioms lent itself to misrepresentation; and nothing could more clearly prove the affectionate considerateness of his nature, his desire for sympathy and relationship, his tender care for those whom he loved in spirit, than his fear of giving a wrong bias to their outlook. And thus the omission has a biographical interest, as showing the first shadow of disapproval falling on the sensitive mind, that disapproval which sometimes hung like a cloud over Pater’s enjoyment of the world, though it never for a moment diverted him from his serious and sustained purpose, as a prophet of mysteries. Pater’s art criticism was distinctly of a literary and traditional type. He made little attempt to trace or weigh the extrinsic value of works of art, or to discuss the subject from the archaeological or the technical point of view. He accepted the traditional knowledge of the period, made no artistic discoveries, settled no controverted points. His concern was entirely with the artistic merits of a picture and its poetical suggestiveness; his criticism, indeed, was of the type which he defined in a review which he wrote many years afterwards for the _Guardian_ as “imaginative criticism”—“that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work;” and thus the errors which he made, of which we may quote one or two examples, do not really affect the value of his criticism very greatly. To take his criticism of Leonardo. He was certainly wrong, for instance, in his judgment of the Medusa picture. This is a picture which shows strong traces both of classical and realistic influences. The head is classical, the serpents are realistic. It is almost certainly at least a century later than Leonardo’s period. Again, the little head with the aureole of hair, which Pater had engraved for a frontispiece to the _Renaissance_ as a genuine work of Leonardo’s, is simply a school drawing, done under the influence, perhaps under the supervision, of Leonardo, by a pupil, but certainly not the work of the master’s hand.