Of the essay on “Feuillet’s _La Morte_,” the work of the same year, it is unnecessary to speak. It is a mere review, full of copious quotation, with a slender trickle of exposition; Pater neither philosophises nor evolves principles; he merely analyses the story; indeed, it is rather a problem why he eventually included this study in the _Appreciations_ at all; it is significant only of a certain catholicity of taste, and bears but few traces of his own temperament. But Pater was now hard at work on an interesting series of experiments of a kind that he may be held to have originated. These are the _Imaginary Portraits_, of which the first, “A Prince of Court Painters,” was written in 1885, as soon as _Marius_ was off his hands; two others followed in 1886—“Sebastian van Storck” and “Denys l’Auxerrois”—and a fourth in 1887, “Duke Carl of Rosenmold.” But beside these four, which compose the volume known as _Imaginary Portraits_, there were several others which may be referred to the same class. “The Child in the House,” which has been already treated of, is one. “Hippolytus Veiled,” the work of 1889, is another, which has been dealt with among the _Greek Studies_, with which he included it. He told Mr. Arthur Symons at the end of his life that he intended to bring out a new volume of _Imaginary Portraits_. “Apollo in Picardy,” the work of 1893, was to have been included, as well as “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), of which we have spoken. He added that he meant to write one on the picture by Moroni known as _The Tailor_, which he thought a very fine and dignified figure. He would make him, he said, a Burgomaster. Mr. Ainslie says that he had in his mind Count Raymond of Toulouse as another possible subject. Pater’s method was to take some romantic figure which attracted his attention, to form a conception of the temperament of the man, and study his environment as far as possible. He then would amplify the details, working in historical hints; or else, as in the case of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” it would be a pure fantasy, suggested by some trace of a peculiar mind revealed in the architecture or sculpture of a particular building. This was perhaps the most congenial field for a temperament like Pater’s, that was imaginative rather than creative, that needed a definite _motif_ to set his imagination at work. Thus in the _Imaginary Portraits_ Pater gave himself up to the luxurious pleasure of evolving fantasies arising from some biographical hint, some piece of unnamed art; some type of character that he conceived. They are true creations, worked out in a sober pictorial manner. But they make it abundantly clear that he had not the dramatic gift; there is no attempt at devising the play of situations, no contrast of character. The backgrounds, both of people and of landscape, are finely indicated; but the interest in each concentrates upon a single figure, and they are told in a species of dreamy recitative.