independent of that. And still I wonder how much you may be losing,
both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its
gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many
things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of
looking at the world. You call it only "realistic." Still!

With sincere wishes for the future success of your most entertaining
pen.--Very sincerely yours,

WALTER PATER.

Remember, reader, that this letter was written by the last great English
writer, by the author of "Imaginary Portraits," the most beautiful of
all prose books. I should like to break off and tell of my delight in
reading "Imaginary Portraits," but I have told my delight elsewhere; go,
seek out what I have said in the pages of the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for
August 1904, for here I am obliged to tell you of myself. I give you
Pater's letter, for I wish you to read this book with reverence; never
forget that Pater's admiration has made this book a sacred book. Never
forget that.

My special pleasure in these early pages was to find that I thought
about Pater twenty years ago as I think about him now, and shall
certainly think of him till time everlasting, world without end. I have
been accused of changing my likes and dislikes--no one has changed less
than I, and this book is proof of my fidelity to my first ideas; the
ideas I have followed all my life are in this book--dear crescent moon
rising in the south-east above the trees at the end of the village
green. It was in that ugly but well-beloved village on the south coast I
discovered my love of Protestant England. It was on the downs that the