sympathy by Professor Dill. Yet it may be said, without fear of
contradiction, that no book has ever been written, nor is likely ever to
appear, which has conveyed to those who came under its spell a more
intimate and familiar conception of that remarkable period and man than
that which has been given by Walter Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

Opinion is divided about the value of Pater's work, and if it be true
that some of his admirers have provoked criticism by their unqualified
praise, it is no less true that many of his detractors appear never to
have come in contact with his mind at all. Born in 1839, he spent the
greater part of his life in Queen's College, Oxford, where he died in
1894. As literary critic, humanist, and master of a thoroughly original
style, he made a considerable impression upon his generation from the
first; but it may be safely said that it is only now, when readers are
able to look upon his work in a more spacious and leisurely way, that he
and his contribution to English thought and letters have come to their
own.

The family was of Dutch extraction, and while the sons of his
grandfather were trained in the Roman Catholic religion, the daughters
were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman
Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of
Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and
widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to
symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too
cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before
his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings,
but he soon parted from that wayward and contradictory master, whose
brilliant dogmatism enslaved so thoroughly, but so briefly, the taste of
young England. Ruskin, however, had awakened Pater, although to a style