ollege, Oxford, where he died in
1894. As literary critic, humanist, and master of a thoroughly original
style, he made a considerable impression upon his generation from the
first; but it may be safely said that it is only now, when readers are
able to look upon his work in a more spacious and leisurely way, that he
and his contribution to English thought and letters have come to their
own.

The family was of Dutch extraction, and while the sons of his
grandfather were trained in the Roman Catholic religion, the daughters
were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman
Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of
Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and
widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to
symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too
cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before
his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings,
but he soon parted from that wayward and contradictory master, whose
brilliant dogmatism enslaved so thoroughly, but so briefly, the taste of
young England. Ruskin, however, had awakened Pater, although to a style
of criticism very different from his own, and for this service we owe
him much. The environment of Oxford subjected his spirit to two widely
different sets of influences. On the one hand, he was in contact with
such men as Jowett, Nettleship, and Thomas Hill Green: on the other
hand, with Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites. Thus the
awakened spirit felt the dominion both of a high spiritual rationalism,
and of the beauty of flesh and the charm of the earth. A visit to Italy
in company with Shadwell, and his study of the Renaissance there, made
him an enthusiastic humanist. The immediate product of this second
awakening was the _Renaissance_ Essays, a very remarkable volume of his
early work. Twelve years later, _Marius the Epicurean_, his second book,
appeared in 1885. In Dr. Gosse, Pater has found an interpreter of rare
sympathy and insight, whose appreciations of his contemporaries are, in
their own right, fine contributions to modern literature.

The characteristics of his style were also those both of his thought and
of his character. Dr. Gosse has summed up the reserve and shy reticence
and the fastidious taste which always characterise his work, in saying
that he was "one of the most exquisite,