to
the hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
little, between the discomfort of the underground railway and the
distress of the lecture-hall.

In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarely
quite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made the
greater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularly
fond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining with
him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which he
took up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down carefully
again on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget had
sent him the first volume of his _Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_,
and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the part
containing the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a lover
of cats I thought she might have spared him!'

We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I was
of them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I am
getting to find they are very similar.' Then he began to tell me about
the fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublished
fragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of the
booths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts,' and the little
wild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest of
the French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his own
woods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he could
have seen a tiger.'

I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of the
painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I believe so, I
always say so.' The relationship has never been verified, but one would
like to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the English
writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that he
came to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary _Life of
Watteau_ by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of _L'Art
du XVIII^e Siecle_, out of which he has made certainly the most living
of his _Imaginary Portraits_, that _Prince of Court Painters_ which is
supposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we
see in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889[4]
Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, of
which _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have bee