ing nothing for reviewers or posterity to
dissipate. From the author of the _Upton Letters_ we expect sympathy and
critical acumen. It is needless to say we are never disappointed. His
book is not merely about a literary man: it is a work of literature
itself. So it is charming to disagree with Mr. Benson sometimes, and a
triumph to find him tripping. You experience the pleasure of the
University Extension lecturer pointing out the mistakes in Shakespeare's
geography, the joy of the schoolboy when the master has made a false
quantity. In marking the modern discoveries which have shattered, not
the value of Pater's criticisms, but the authenticity of pictures round
which he wove his aureoles of prose, Mr. Benson says: 'In the essay on
Botticelli he is on firmer ground.' But among the first masterpieces
winged by the sportsmen of the new criticism was the Hamilton Palace
'Assumption of the Virgin' (now proved to be by Botticini), to which
Pater makes one of his elusive and delightful allusions. While the
'_School of Giorgione_,' which Mr. Benson thinks a little _passe_ in the
light of modern research is now in the movement. The latest bulletins of
Giorgione, Pater would have been delighted to hear, are highly
satisfactory. Pictures once torn from the altars of authenticity are
being reinstated under the acolytage of Mr. Herbert Cook. A curious and
perhaps wilful error, too, has escaped Mr. Benson's notice. Referring to
the tomb of Cardinal Jacopo at San Miniato, Pater says, 'insignis forma
fui--his epitaph dares to say;' the inscription reads _fuit_. But
perhaps the _t_ was added by the Italian Government out of Reference to
the English residents in Florence, and the word read _fui_ in 1871.
_Troja fuit_ might be written all over Florence.

Then some of the architecture at Vezelay 'typical of Cluniac sculpture'
is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am assured by a competent authority. A more
serious error of Pater's, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs in
_Apollo in Picardy_--'_rebellious_ masses of black hair.' This is the
only instance in the _parfait prosateur_, as Bourget called him, of a
cliche worthy of the 'Spectator.' Then it is possible to differ from Mr.
Benson in his criticism of the _Imaginary Portraits_ (the four fair ovals
in one volume), surely Pater's most exquisite achievement after the
_Renaissance_. _Gaston_ is the failure Pater thought it was, and
_Emerald Uthwart_ is frankly very silly, thoug