verse as a more intimate gift for
those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature.
I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a
publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me.

I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor
means of communication. Don't come to London without making an
appointment to come and see me here.--Very sincerely yours,

WALTER PATER.

'Browning, one of my best-loved writers,' is a phrase I find in his
first letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book on
Browning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention of
any other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossetti
which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which I
have from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter of
business: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was
doing, about which he advises and encourages me.

In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by their
persistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send by
post was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason for
hesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me,' he
writes in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lest
it should get bruised by transit through the post.' He wrote letters
with distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses or
regrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now with
pupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:
'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or,
as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know by
experience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy.' A review
took him sometimes a year to get through; and remained in the end, like
his letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, like
his published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of the
three lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one on
Merimee, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other on
Raphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severer
humiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony which
communicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going in