of real character and incident from the
veritable streets' of the town itself. From this strange design Mr.
Pater has fashioned a curious mediaeval myth of the return of Dionysus
among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of
wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god,
making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists
simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel of music from reed and
pipe, and slain at last in a stage-play by those who had loved him. In
its rich affluence of imagery this story is like a picture by Mantegna,
and indeed Mantegna might have suggested the description of the pageant
in which Denys rides upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment
and, for head-dress, a strange elephant scalp with gilded tusks.

If _Denys l'Auxerrois_ symbolizes the passion of the senses and
_Sebastian Van Storck_ the philosophic passion, as they certainly seem to
do, though no mere formula or definition can adequately express the
freedom and variety of the life that they portray, the passion for the
imaginative world of art is the basis of the story of _Duke Carl of
Rosenmold_. Duke Carl is not unlike the late King of Bavaria, in his
love of France, his admiration for the _Grand Monarque_ and his fantastic
desire to amaze and to bewilder, but the resemblance is possibly only a
chance one. In fact Mr. Pater's young hero is the precursor of the
_Aufklarung_ of the last century, the German precursor of Herder and
Lessing and Goethe himself, and finds the forms of art ready to his hand
without any national spirit to fill them or make them vital and
responsive. He too dies, trampled to death by the soldiers of the
country he so much admired, on the night of his marriage with a peasant
girl, the very failure of his life lending him a certain melancholy grace
and dramatic interest.

On the whole, then, this is a singularly attractive book. Mr. Pater is
an intellectual impressionist. He does not weary us with any definite
doctrine or seek to suit life to any formal creed. He is always looking
for exquisite moments and, when he has found them, he analyses them with
delicate and delightful art and then passes on, often to the opposite
pole of thought or feeling, knowing that every mood has its own quality
and charm and is justified by its mere existence. He has taken the
sensationalism of Greek philosophy and made it a new method of