Throughout the whole of the study, as one might expect, the personality of Pater emerges in little dicta and comments. “Alas!” writes the girl, “How little peace have his great successes given him; how little of that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity of character.” The interest, then, of this little study lies not so much in itself, as in the fact that it is from the creative point of view the most ambitious, the most deliberately dramatic, of Pater’s writings. He attempted to throw himself into a French mood, and in this he has partially succeeded; and into the mood of a quiet girl of the bourgeois class; and here he must be held to have failed. Perhaps it revealed to him his own limitations, his own strength. For he wisely wrote no more in this manner. In “Denys l’Auxerrois” we have one of the most fantastic of all Pater’s writings; indeed, in this strange combination of the horrible and the beautiful, there is something almost unbalanced, something that reminds one of the rich madness of Blake; as if the mind, though kept in artistic check, had flung itself riotously over the line that divides imagination from insanity; the fancy seems to struggle and trample with a strange self-born fury, as though it had taken the bit in its teeth, and was with difficulty overmastered. The essay begins soberly enough with a vein of quiet reminiscence of travel; the writer is supposed to see some tapestries at a priest’s house representing a series of strange experiences; and it is upon this that the story is based. Denys of Auxerre, a love-child, comes among the craftsmen of the place, like a pagan god incarnate, and fills them, like Dionysus, with a species of Bacchic fury. This idea, the reappearance of pagan deities, had a strong fascination for Pater’s mind. The curious and contradictory traits of the character of the boy, gentleness side by side with cruelty, wild courage shadowed by unreasonable terrors, his unaccountable appearances and disappearances, his mysterious gifts of presage and inspiration, are all subtly indicated. “Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar, and would climb with delight to the great scaffolding on the unfinished tower to watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land, till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the church below; and then, throwing off his mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely, clinging firmly against the tempestuous wind among the carved imageries of dark stone.”