All this time Pater was engaged upon a great work, which was destined never to be finished. _Gaston de Latour_ was embarked upon soon after the completion of _Marius_. Five chapters appeared in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ in the course of 1888. A sixth chapter appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in the next year under the title of “Giordano Bruno,” and various other unfinished fragments remain. The chapter called “Shadows of Events” is the only one of these which has been included in the 1902 volume. In the case of a writer as sedulous, as eager for perfection, as Pater it is right to withhold the incomplete fragments. He seems for some cause to have abandoned the book in dissatisfaction. We may speculate as to the cause of this. I am myself disposed to think that he found the historical setting too complicated and the canvas too much crowded. As the story advances the personality seems to ebb out of the figure of the hero, and he becomes a mere mirror of events and other personalities. The influences, too, that are brought to bear on him are of so complicated a nature that his development seems hampered rather than enlarged. No doubt Pater felt that the book was not exhibiting his own best qualities of workmanship; and there is a growing weariness visible, as if he felt that he was failing to cope with the pressure of historical experience that was closing in upon the central figure. It may here be said that Pater’s best work is that which is built up delicately and imaginatively out of shadowy hints of events and slender records. His power lay in filling in, heightening, and enriching faint outlines, not in selecting typical touches from great masses of detail. He felt, and rightly, that he had mistaken his capacity. The period he had chosen, the struggle of Huguenots and Catholics, is crowded with salient figures, but to treat it romantically, the tact, the swift intuition, of such a writer as Walter Scott was needed, sketching in broad washes and bold strokes; not the patient and accumulative toil of a minute and delicate writer like Pater. The story opens beautifully enough. The boy Gaston lives the quiet life of the country at the old house of Deux-manoirs in La Beauce, the central corn-land of France, with the dim shape of the great church of Chartres visible, like a ship under press of canvas, on the low horizon. Gaston is of the same type as Marius—innocent, serious, devout, keenly sensitive to impressions of beauty. We see him first taking upon himself the vows of the ecclesiastical life, “duly arrayed for dedication, with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded over his left shoulder,” in the dark glowing church. Somehow the figure fails to appeal to us. We feel—could Pater have felt the same?—that we are but meeting Marius over again in altered circumstances. Yet the description of the Office, sung in the presence of the courtly and vivacious Bishop of Chartres, is full of beauty:—