the storm is breaking in thunder and rain. So, too, in “The Judgment of Solomon” panel there is no concentration of motive; each figure is conceived separately, and there is no sort of attempt at dramatic combination. But when all this has been said, it really affects very little the value of Pater’s work. After all, the pictures which he described exist; the message which they held for his own spirit was generated by the sight of them, and the poetical suggestiveness of his criticism is full of vital force; he made no attempt to set misconception right, to date pictures, or to alter their dates. He took them on trust; and thus, though his judgments have no precise technical value, the inspiration of his sympathetic emotion forfeits little or none of its force by being expended on pictures which he did not attribute correctly, and which it could not be expected that he should have so attributed. The publication of the _Renaissance_ was to be attended by important results. It gave Pater a definite place in the literary and artistic world. But it had a still deeper effect. The spirit of artistic revolt was in the air. The writings of Ruskin, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites may be taken as two salient instances in very different regions of the rising tendency. What underlay the whole movement was a desire to treat art seriously, and to give it its place in the economy of human influences. Side by side with this was a strong vein of discontent with established theories of religion, of education, of mental cultivation. The younger generation was thrilled with a sense of high artistic possibilities; it realised that there was a hidden treasure of accumulated art, ancient and medieval, which remained as a living monument of certain brilliant and glowing forces that seemed to have become quiescent. It became aware that it was existing under cramped conditions, in a comfortable barbarism, encompassed by strict and respectable traditions, living a bourgeois kind of life, fettered by a certain stupid grossness, a life that checked the free development of the soul. Pater’s suggestive and poetical treatment of medieval art fired a train, and tended to liberate an explosive revolutionary force of artistic feeling which manifested itself in intemperate extravagances for which he was indeed in no sense responsible, but which could be to a certain extent referred to his principles. Young men with vehement impulses, with no experience of the world, no idea of the solid and impenetrable weight of social traditions and prejudices, found in the principles enunciated by Pater with so much recondite beauty, so much magical charm, a new equation of values. Pater himself was to pay dearly for his guileless sincerity, his frank confidence.