The conclusion, then, for Pater is that our work should unite the true qualities of both romanticism and classicalism; that it should be fresh, new, spontaneous, and unconventional; decorous, but not hampered by decorum; gaining soberness and richness from recognised methods and due authority; but in the truest sense a development, neither a new departure nor a servile imitation. We are not to think slightingly of the old forms, or to neglect the hallowed influences of association; authority must control the manner, vitality suggest the matter. And in all this Pater is true to his creed, clinging as he did to the old forms of melodies and enriching them with new harmonies. He is content, indeed, to look backwards with reverent eyes upon the past; but he is all alive with the problems of the present, the hopes of the future. And thus the essay comes to have a direct value, because in it he summarises and reflects, stating the truth positively, and not by allusion and in allegories. It is in a sense one of the manifestoes scattered through his writings; and it testifies to his belief, which one might forget in his dwelling upon the old and the established, that he was in heart upon the side of the new, the inquisitive, the expansive; that his work indeed is only critical in form, but essentially creative in spirit. He wrote too, at this time, the essay on the “School of Giorgione,” which was added to the _Renaissance_ essays in the third edition, and which has already been discussed. But his main concern was with the _Greek Studies_. “Demeter and Persephone” was delivered in the form of two lectures at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1876. In the same year and in the same magazine appeared the “Dionysus.” As then the most solid and vigorous sections of the _Greek Studies_ were the work of these years, it will be better to speak of the book here, rather than at the date of its eventual publication (1895). I do not mean here to dwell at any great length upon the volume, beautiful as the _Studies_ are, because they are so strongly intermingled with the antiquarian and the scholarly element that they require a familiarity with classical learning, a special sort of initiation, to comprehend them. They are fully but not heavily freighted with erudition, and testify to a long and patient accumulation of facts and traditions. When the accumulation was complete—and it must have been a task of great labour—the details had to be touched as lightly and placed as expressively as possible. And they thus stand as an excellent work of art, and testify to the shaping into finished and balanced studies of a mass of technical and professional material.