Pater seems in this essay to have endeavoured, we will not say to enforce the dangers of the intellectual pursuit of abstraction, for the picture has hardly an ethical motive, but to depict in neutral tints the natural course of the quest of pure reason. It is a melancholy essay. Sebastian seems to suffocate under warmth and light; and the whole sketch has something of the frozen silence, the mute impassivity, of the stiffened leafless earth. It is more like a piece of cold and colourless sculpture than a picture; and the contrast of the stainless icy figure of the victim of thought thrown into relief by the warm, fire-lit, comfortable indoor world, peopled with types of indolent and contented materialists, is skilfully enough wrought. But the subtle beauty of the treatment does not remove a certain inner dreariness of thought, and the central figure seems to shiver underneath the rich robe draped about it. “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” is an eighteenth-century study of a very different temperament. He is the heir of an aged Grand-Duke, and is full to the brim of enthusiasm for art, music, literature, and nature. But just as Sebastian van Storck was the victim of an excess of intellectual power, so Duke Carl is the victim of its defect. His soul is in revolt against stolid German heaviness; he is a typical figure of the spirit of the Renaissance, all athirst for beauty and novelty. But his temperament is whimsical and unbalanced; he has little originality or lucidity of thought; he falls under the spell of all that is rococo, and mistakes novelty for energy; he takes up each new interest with eager zest, but too soon tires of it; to relieve the dreariness of satiety in the search for new sensations, he causes his death to be announced and is present in disguise at his own funeral. Here he parts company with soundness of mind, and in his rebellion against all that is conventional he mistakes the true stuff out of which unconventionality is made. The true creative genius, to use a metaphor, accepts the conventions of the age as a sort of necessary frame to impulse, and troubles his head little about it; his concern is with the picture itself, how to make it perfectly sincere, perfectly impressive. But Duke Carl’s originality is vitiated by the desire to startle and surprise timid natures, and to have his originality admired or at least recognised. His grandfather abdicates, and soon after dies, and Duke Carl’s mind, which has been distracted for a while by foreign travel, becomes set upon marriage with a peasant girl, partly from real affection, partly from a desire to do the unexpected thing. His end is somewhat mysterious; he arranges to meet his betrothed in a lonely stronghold, and falls a victim to an armed invasion. Contrary to his habit, instead of letting the story speak for itself, Pater appends a conclusion in which he says that his object has been to sketch a precursor of what may be called the German Renaissance, of Lessing