1906.] on Walter Pater. 211 



effects by a severe economy, refining, calculating, adjusting, and 

 compressing. 



All this time there is no hint of precocity about the boy ; as a 

 rule the children who are to develop into great writers, have an early 

 creative impulse, and blacken paper industriously from their first 

 years ; but there is no reason to beUeve that Pater did anything of 

 the kind. 



In 1858 he entered at Queen's College, Oxford, whose great, open, 

 ItaHan screen and cupola abutting on the High Street are familiar to 

 all who know Oxford. Here Pater lived a very quiet and secluded 

 life with a few friends, in the plain back court of the College. He 

 worked with moderate industry at his classical books, and experienced 

 the attractions of metaphysical study. The only person who seems to 

 have divined his powers was Jowett, whose lectures he attended, who 

 said to him once, in one of those lean dry phrases which seem to have 

 had such a singular effect in stimulating the minds of the young men 

 to whom they were addressed, " Mr. Pater, I believe you have a mind 

 which will one day come to great eminence." But Pater failed to do 

 himself justice in his examinations, and only took a second class in 

 Greats in 1862. For a time he lingered on at Oxford taking pupils, 

 but in 1864 he was fortunate enough to be elected a Fellow of 

 Brasenose, where he at once went into residence ; it was to be his 

 home for the rest of his life. 



It is one of the ironies of fate that Pater's name should be con- 

 nected with a college that, during the greater part of the time that 

 he held office there, was pre-eminent for athletics, and for a youthful 

 ebullience of spirits among its undergraduates that is known by the 

 name of rowdiness. The college itself consists of two courts, one of 

 which turns a black and bhstered Gothic front upon the RadcHffe 

 Library, the other, mainly modern, extending to the High. It 

 is an austere-looking place, a real fortress of study. It has no very 

 conspicuous feature, and is not set, as so many Oxford Colleges are, 

 in a trim and sunny garden. The chapel, which holds Pater's 

 monument, is a stately Renaissance building, with a curious infusion 

 of Gothic. Inside, it wears a dignified classical air, as though it were 

 more perhaps in love with the solemnities of religion than its essence, 

 as though it desired more to record the tabernacling of God with man 

 than the aspiring of man to God, which Gothic somehow seems to 

 bear in view. 



In a corner of the front court a Uttle staircase winds barely up, 

 dark and narrow, to the first floor. Here is a door, low and grim, set 

 in a thick wall, which admits you to a small panelled room, with a 

 deeply recessed oriel window looking out on the Radcliffe Library. 

 A trace of Pater's dainty ways still lingers in the pretty ironwork of 

 the doors brought by him from Brittany. This was his only sitting- 

 room. Here he wrote, read, taught and took his solitary and simple 

 meals. His outer door, which could be closed to keep out intruders, 



p 2 



