, while
they necessitate more intense vision. And yet what a high ideal is
contained in these few pages! How good it is for us, in these days of
popular education and facile journalism, to be reminded of the real
scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true
lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of
their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious
ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and
will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means,
by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that
conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind in style. I
think I have been wrong in saying that the subject is too abstract. In
Mr. Pater's hands it becomes very real to us indeed, and he shows us how,
behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's
soul.

As one passes to the rest of the volume, one finds essays on Wordsworth
and on Coleridge, on Charles Lamb and on Sir Thomas Browne, on some of
Shakespeare's plays and on the English kings that Shakespeare fashioned,
on Dante Rossetti, and on William Morris. As that on Wordsworth seems to
be Mr. Pater's last work, so that on the singer of the _Defence of
Guenevere_ is certainly his earliest, or almost his earliest, and it is
interesting to mark the change that has taken place in his style. This
change is, perhaps, at first sight not very apparent. In 1868 we find
Mr. Pater writing with the same exquisite care for words, with the same
studied music, with the same temper, and something of the same mode of
treatment. But, as he goes on, the architecture of the style becomes
richer and more complex, the epithet more precise and intellectual.
Occasionally one may be inclined to think that there is, here and there,
a sentence which is somewhat long, and possibly, if one may venture to
say so, a little heavy and cumbersome in movement. But if this be so, it
comes from those side-issues suddenly suggested by the idea in its
progress, and really revealing the idea more perfectly; or from those
felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central
scheme, and yet convey something of the charm of chance; or from a desire
to suggest the secondary shades of meaning with all their accumulating
effect, and to avoid, it may be, the violence and harshness of too
definite and exclusive an opinion.