l prejudice or
principle. But he laid it down explicitly in some places, implicitly
throughout, that the object of life should be to extract to the utmost
the pleasure of living in the more refined way, and expressly and
especially the pleasure to be derived from education and art. The
indebtedness of this both to the Arnoldian and Ruskinian creeds, its
advance (in the main a legitimate advance) on the former, and its
heretical deviation from the development of the latter, require no
comment. But this propaganda, if so violent a word may be used, of Mr.
Pater's placid creed, called to aid a most remarkable style--a style of
the new kind, lavish of adjective and the _mot de lumiere_, but not
exceedingly florid, and aiming especially at such an arrangement of the
clause, the sentence, and the paragraph, such a concerted harmony of
cadence and symphony, as had not been deliberately tried before in
prose. The effects which it produced on different tastes were themselves
sufficiently different. Some found the purport too distasteful to give a
dispassionate attention to the presentment; others disliked the manner
itself as formal, effeminate, and "precious." But there were others who,
while recognising the danger of excess in this direction, thought and
think that a distinct and remarkable experiment had been made in English
prose, and that the best examples of it deserved a place with the best
examples of the ornater styles at any previous time and in any other
kind.

Mr. Pater was not tempted by such popularity as his book received to
hasten publication; indeed it was understood that after beginning to
print a second collection of Essays, he became dissatisfied with them,
and caused the type to be broken up. But the advance of so-called
AEstheticism was too strong an invitation, and prepared for him too large
and eager an audience, so that the last decade of his life saw several
books, _Marius the Epicurean_, _Imaginary Portraits_, _Appreciations_,
while others appeared posthumously. Of these the first-named is
unquestionably the best and most important. Although Greek had been the
indispensable--almost the cardinal--principle in Mr. Pater's own
literary development, he had been so strongly affected by modern thought
and taste, that he could hardly recover a dispassionate view of the
older classics. _Imaginary Portraits_, an attempt at constructive rather
than critical art, required qualities which he did not possess, and e