Produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.

ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'

By WALTER HORATIO PATER

E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01

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ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'

NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly caution in using it. It is not intended as a substitute for the printed original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where both instructor and students accept the possibility of some imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article, dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions of any works you cite.

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e- text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.

CONTENTS

1. English Literature: 1-16

2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37

3. Browning: 39-51

4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70

5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88

6. Wordsworth: 89-104

7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118

8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134

9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149

ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'

WALTER HORATIO PATER

E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01

PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.

E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first substantive page.

I. ENGLISH LITERATURE

FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and variety of our prose literature being considered, might well follow exclusively some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for instance, what is so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or its (legitimately) poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of English Prose Style, from Malory to Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which bears fresh witness to the truth of the old remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a [4] good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently indicated in the very original "introductory essay," which might well stand, along with the best of these extracts from a hundred or more deceased masters of English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose style. The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen