Of course no great originality is to be expected in these compositions. Thus reviewing three editions of Wordsworth in the _Guardian_ of February 27, 1889, he does not hesitate to use many of his own deliberate dicta from the “Wordsworth” essay which had appeared in the _Fortnightly_ in 1874, and was to be reprinted in the same year in which he wrote the review in question (1889), in _Appreciations_. Perhaps the review of _Robert Elsmere_ (_Guardian_, March 28, 1888) reveals most plainly the almost childlike delight which Pater could take in the _motif_ and characters of a story which one would have thought would not have been by any means congenial to him. Pater’s chief critical work in 1886 was the essay on Sir Thomas Browne, to be published afterwards in the _Appreciations_ of 1889. In this study the same principle of autobiographical selection comes out which we see so constantly at work in Pater’s mind. The charm for him in Browne is that whimsical mixture of scientific and poetical elements, the ceremonious piety, the strong sensitiveness to the human association of things, the thirst to record and express a point of view. Again, what gives Pater a strong interest in Browne’s writings is the fact that he exhibits at a remote point the evolution of native English prose, that evolution which was distracted, we would believe, by the wave of classicalism, the effect of the tide of the Renaissance, which beat, belated and enfeebled, on our solitary shores. The invasion of English prose by the wrong kind of classicalism, the sonorous elaboration of Latinity instead of the lucid charm of native English, deferred, no doubt, the development of natural English prose, though it perhaps eventually ministered to its richness. Browne, like Montaigne in France, is the type of the essayist, the writer whose object is not the precise statement of a case, but the saturation of a subject in his own personality. Such writing is often lacking in structure and conception, but it has an indefinable charm. “It has,” writes Pater of Browne’s style, “its garrulity, its various levels of painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon down at Norwich.” It is just that which is the charm; that it brings before us the same elements that delight us in our own life, the summer, the freshness of the open air, the pleasant house with its gardens and studious chambers, together with a venerable setting which does but heighten the sense that though philosophical, political, and religious theories may have shifted and developed, the greater part of men’s lives and joys are made up out of far simpler and commoner elements, which hardly indeed change from century to century.