employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that
the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and
the story be told. And Pater's _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand
for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is
a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones
of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live
for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at
first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and,
as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of
Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a
masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life,
done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like
over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail,
of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater's
masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as

The golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty,

it is _Marius the Epicurean_.

It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because
Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of
course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to
be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably
that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain
subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its
perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later "Apollo in
Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary