thought. Unluckily for Jefferies,
his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's, clear and
cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. Writing, too, in prose not
verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he attempted an exceedingly florid style,
which at its happiest was happy enough, but which was not always at that
point, and which when it was not was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or
both. It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will
dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of
descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their
particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand Gilbert White and
Gray.

Mr. Arnold, it has been said, abstained almost entirely from dealing
with art. Mr. Ruskin, who has abstained from dealing with nothing, did
not abstain from criticism of literature, but his utterances in it have
been more than usually _obiter dicta_. Yet we must take the two together
if we are to understand the most powerful influence and the most
flourishing school of criticism, literary and other, which has existed
for the last thirty years. This school may be said to halt in a way
between purely literary and generally aesthetic handling, and when it can
to mix the two. Most of its scholars--men obviously under the influence
both of Arnold and of Ruskin, either in submission or in revolt, are
alive, and we reason not of them. But, as it happens, the two most
famous, one of whom was a prose writer, pure and simple, the other a
copious artist in prose and verse, have died recently and call for
judgment. These were Walter Horatio Pater and John Addington Symonds.

The first-named was born in 1839, and went to Oxford, where he was
elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He spent the whole of the rest of
his life either at that college or in London, practising no profession,
competing for no preferment, and for many years at least producing
literature itself with extreme sparingness. It was in 1873 that Mr.
Pater first collected a volume of _Studies in the History of
Renaissance_, which attracted the keenest attention both as to its
manner and as to its matter. The point of view, which was that of an
exceedingly refined and carefully guarded Hedonism, was in a way and at
least in its formulation novel. Mr. Pater did not meddle with any
question of religion; he did not (though there were some who scented
immorality in his attitude) offend directly any ethica