ven
made him temporarily forget his impeccable style: _Appreciations_, good
in itself, was inferior to the first book. But _Marius the Epicurean_
far excelled all these. It, too, took the form of fiction, but the story
went for so little in it that deficiencies therein were not felt. The
book was in effect a reconstruction, partly imaginative, but still more
critical, of a period with which Mr. Pater was probably more in sympathy
than with any other, even the Renaissance itself, to wit the extremely
interesting and strangely modern period when classicism and modernity,
Christianity and Paganism, touched and blended in the second century
after Christ after the fashion revealed to us in the works of Apuleius
most of all, of Lucian to some extent, and of a few others. Mr. Pater
indeed actually introduced the philosopher-novelist of Madaura in the
book, though he was not the hero; and his own peculiar style proved
itself admirably suited to the period and subject, whether in
description and conversation, or in such translation or paraphrase as
that of the famous and exquisite _Pervigilium Veneris_.

For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to the
_Studies of the Renaissance_, which is what Mr. Arnold liked to call a
_point de repere_. The style, less exuberant, less far-reaching and
versatile, and, if any one pleases to say so, less healthy than Mr.
Ruskin's, is much more chastened, finished, and exquisite. It never at
its best neglects the difference between the rhythm of prose and the
metre of verse; if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in
simplicity, it is never overloaded or gaudy. The words are picked; but
they are seldom or never, as has been the case with others, not only
picked but wrenched, not only adjusted to a somewhat unusual society and
use, but deliberately forced into uses and societies wholly different
from those to which readers are accustomed. Above all, no one, it must
be repeated, has ever surpassed, and scarcely any one has ever equalled
Mr. Pater in deliberate and successful architecture of the
prose-paragraph--in what may, for the sake of a necessary difference, be
called the scriptorial in opposition to the oratorical manner. He may
fall short of the poetic grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne, of the
phantasmagoric charm of De Quincey at his rare best, of the gorgeous
panoramas of Mr. Ruskin. But his happiest paragraphs are like
_flamboyant_ chantries, not imposing, not quit