Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS One sometimes thinks that the nineteenth century was never completely cured of that world-malady of its middle age which became chronic from the first romantic green-sickness of its youth. Among the obscurer and less remarked symptoms of this disease was its easy catholicity of taste, its lack of normal narrowness in literary matters. There was something virile, in spite of limitations, in an age which could say with Pepys that "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was "the foolishest play" that ever it saw. In the surcease of bitter, bookish dislikes and complacent depreciations, in the profuse geniality of literary judgments the nineteenth in its maturity was the Hamlet of the centuries. Of this affable, retrospective turn in the mind of his age Walter Pater is an excellent example. One of the first impressions which the considerate reader derives from his criticism is that of the absence from it of the note of personal antipathy; and this is likely to be coupled with a perception of the wide area of bookland which it drains. Pater was a man of adventurous mental temperament, and in those long, leisurely years at Oxford he voyaged through strange, and sometimes perilous, seas of thought, He read voluminously; and preserved from his reading, by the aid of innumerable little squares of paper, immense stores of impressions and ideas. The reader of his essays will find therein not only a sympathetic, but even a respectably exact, knowledge of enough departments of scholarship to provide a decent outfit of mental furniture for some half-dozen academic specialists. He knew his English, Continental, Latin, and Greek literature as a scholar knows them; of philosophy, both ancient and modern, he possessed a knowledge more than usually close, and much more ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.