ography. I remember being told in America that
whenever Margaret Fuller wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had
always to send out to borrow some additional capital 'I's,' and I feel it
right to accept this transatlantic warning.

Appreciations, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given by
Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite
essays, of delicately wrought works of art--some of them being almost
Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval
in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to
whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the
age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to
its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about
others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead
mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may
make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but
intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he
who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure.

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the
essays contained in the present volume is that on Style. It is the most
interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high
authority that comes from the noble realisation of things nobly
conceived. It is the least successful, because the subject is too
abstract. A true artist like Mr. Pater is most felicitous when he deals
with the concrete, whose very limitations give him finer freedom, 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