It is abundantly clear that, in the case of Wordsworth, Pater felt himself drawing near to a highly congenial personality. He speaks in another essay of the poet’s “flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind.” The dignity, the seriousness, the quietness, the impassioned quality of the poet’s life made a strong appeal to him, and not less the high purpose to which he dedicated his whole life: the rendering and interpreting of beautiful impressions, the desire to impart to others what gave him joy and tranquillity; and thus the whole essay is redolent of a sort of trustful affection, the mood in which a man speaks simply and sincerely of a point of view which he instinctively admires, a character that is very dear to his heart. Pater goes, indeed, so far as to say in a later essay that a careful reading of Wordsworth is probably the very best thing that can be found to counteract the faults and offences of our busy and restless generation, as helping to remind us, “amid the enormous expansion of all that is material and mechanical in life, of the essential value, the permanent ends, of life itself.” The essay on “Charles Lamb” (1878) is another instance of Pater’s power of selecting and emphasising the congenial elements of a character. It is not the inconsequent, the reckless humour of Charles Lamb that Pater values most, his power of pursuing a humorous image, of clinging to it, as Lamb did among the rubs and adversities of the world, as a man in a beating sea might cling to a spar for his life. Pater is rather in love with the contrast of Lamb’s life, the tragic undercurrent of fate, that ran like a dark stream below his lightness, his pathetic merriment. He admires him as an artist first, because “in the making of prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of verse.” He values him for the “little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others,” for his deep and patient friendships; he sees in him “a lover of household warmth everywhere,” a collector of things which gain a colour for him “by the little accidents which attest previous ownership.” He loves him because he “has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic ‘gentilities,’ even; while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like Shakespeare.” “Unoccupied,” he says, “as he might seem, with great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect understanding of it.” He realises, too, the fineness and largeness of Lamb’s criticism; he says that when Lamb comments on Shakespeare, he is like “a man who walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to be abroad upon the air”; and he does, too, full justice to