It may be said that this is exactly the effect which the writer intended to produce, and the art is manifest. But for all that there is a species of uncanny terror which invests the tale; not the terror which may involve the narrative of one who has seen strange things and records them faithfully, but the terror with which one might watch a magician trafficking in breathless secrets, with a certain dark power of using energies which seem to menace alike serenity and virtue. “Emerald Uthwart” is a little fantasy written in 1892. The incidents related are simple enough, and yet in a way sensational. Emerald is the son of an ancient English family, brought up in an old Sussex home, long the property of his ancestors, people of an unemphatic type. “Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous.” He goes to school, contrary to the tradition of the family, and the scene of his education is laid at what is obviously the King’s School, Canterbury. Here he forms a great friendship with a boy a little older than himself, James Stokes; they go on to Oxford together, get commissions in the army, in consequence of the breaking out afresh of a war, the scene of which is laid in Flanders. They are kept waiting before a beleaguered town; James Stokes conceives a plan of entering the town with a few men on an expedition the object of which is obscure. They enter the town, secure their prize—a weather-beaten flag—and issue out again to find that the army has moved on; they rejoin their regiment, are tried by court-martial, and condemned to death. They are led out to execution, and when James Stokes has been shot, the scene being described with a grim realism, it is announced that Emerald’s sentence has been commuted into one of degradation and dismissal. This is carried out; he wanders about in want and wretchedness, but finally makes his way home, where he eventually dies, after a lingering illness of four years, from an old wound, aggravated by hardship and mental suffering. Just before the end his case is brought before the military authorities, and he receives an offer of a commission. The story ends by a somewhat terrible extract supposed to be from a surgeon’s diary, who removes the ball from the wound. The _motif_ of the story is to depict a certain type of Englishman, a type of decorous submissiveness. But the interest of the type lies rather in the attempt that is made to represent it in a character of great modesty and simplicity, but with a high natural charm both of manner and physical appearance. The weakness of the conception may be said to lie in the fact, that apart from this external and physical charm the character is rather essentially uninteresting—unambitious and demure—a Spartan, not an Athenian type. It was probably Pater’s object to depict the Spartan element of public-school education; and it is here that the main interest of the sketch lies.