imself aloof from contemporary thought, produced
almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color,
ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects
as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere
soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to
charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to
make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact,
after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant
essay, _Leonardo Da Vinci_, in the volume, _The Renaissance: Studies
in Art and Poetry_[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of
his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of
Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture--

"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,'
and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from
within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women
of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into
which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and
flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of
fiction,--Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel
gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.

In addition to the chief novelists,--Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were
many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of
fiction. In this class are the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte
Bronte (1816-1855) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848), the daughters of a
clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they
were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and