The portraits of Pater are, so his friends declare, unlike him. He had irregular features, and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in the head, glowed with a jewelled fire when he was deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's wholly admirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed by the unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 1872. There is in Mosher's edition of the Guardian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study, a characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson says it is not considered a resemblance. And I have a picture, a half-tone, from some magazine, the original evidently photographic, that shows a Pater much more powerful in expression than the others, and without a hint of the ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing and Moore's pen portrait. Pater never married. Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a deep impression on him, and, again like Newman, to use his own words, he went his way "like one on a secret errand." And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years--he wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase, "it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English," we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the "natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless, undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the _cliché_ is king of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine writing," are more easily detected.