In 1877, the year in which the second edition of the _Renaissance_ was issued, appeared Mr. Mallock’s _New Republic_. It is a difficult question to decide to what extent a satire of the kind is justifiable. It was an extraordinarily suggestive and humorous book; and the author would no doubt justly maintain that in Mr. Rose he was merely parodying a type of the aesthetic school; but language was put into Mr. Rose’s mouth which was obviously a faithful parody of Pater’s style of writing, with an added touch of languor and extravagance. The bitterness of the satire was increased by its being cast in a conversational form, so that it would be concluded by those who did not know Pater that his conversation in a mixed society was couched in this exotic and affected vein, reaching a degree of grotesqueness on the one hand and sensuousness on the other which was bound to produce an unpleasant effect on the minds of readers. Mr. Rose is made to discourse in public in a dreamy vein in a manner which draws from Lady Ambrose, a conventional and worldly person, the comment that he always speaks of every one “as if they had no clothes on.” But there are more disagreeable innuendoes than that; and as it was inevitable from the language employed that Mr. Rose should be identified with Pater, it is hard to absolve the author from the charge of sacrificing the scrupulous justice that should have been shown to an individual to the desire for effectiveness and humour, though on the other hand an ample excuse is afforded in the youthful ebullience of the book, written, it is marvellous to reflect, when the author was still an undergraduate. Pater had indeed laid himself in one sense open to the attack, by committing to the impersonal medium of a book sentiments which could be distorted into the sensuous creed of aesthetes; to satirise the advanced type of the aesthetic school was perfectly fair, but it was unduly harsh to cause an affected and almost licentious extravagance of behaviour to be attributed to one whose private life and conversation were of so sober and simple a character. It seems clear that the satire caused Pater considerable distress. If he had been personally vain or socially ambitious, it might have gratified him to be included in so distinguished a company; but all this was entirely foreign to his retired and studious habits; he did not at all desire to have a mysterious and somewhat painful prestige thrust upon him; and though he seldom if ever spoke of the subject even to his most intimate friends, yet it is impossible not to realise that the satire must have caused him sincere pain. It was in this mood that he said to Mr. Gosse, “I wish they wouldn’t call me a ‘hedonist’; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek.” He felt that he had been deliberately misrepresented, made unjustly notorious, and the sober and strenuous ideal of his life cruelly obscured.