n one. He had another subject
in Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he was
going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of
life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a
modern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apollo
in Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _The
Child in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in
_Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter
of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something,
he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it,
the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old
house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much
of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their
caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in
her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who
had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train,
and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_.' It was because he always
dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary
portrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on with
it because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of his
mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it,
he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and
that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later
manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no
continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.

Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the course
of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from
what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers,
he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has
been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief
'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in
Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular
outlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphaneite_, there is already the
substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh
in the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention,
but I do not doubt that there, to the youn