PATER, WALTER HORATIO ( ,1839-1894), English man of letters, was born at Shadwell on Aug. 4, 1839. He was the sec ond son of Richard Glode Pater, a medical man, of Dutch extrac tion, born in New York. After Richard Pater's death the family moved to Enfield, where the children were brought up. Walter Pater was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Queen's College, Oxford. After taking his degree he settled in Oxford and read with private pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a fellow ship at Brasenose. Pater now began to write for the reviews, his early papers including one on Coleridge in the Westminster Re view (1866), and another (1867) on Winckelmann. In the fol lowing year his study of "Aesthetic Poetry" appeared in the Fortnightly Review, to be succeeded by essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo. These, with other studies of the same kind, were in 1878 collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance.
Pater was now the centre of a small circle in Oxford. The little body of Pre-Raphaelites were among his friends, and by the time that Marius the Epicurean appeared he had quite a following of disciples to hail it as a gospel. This fine and polished work, the chief of all his contributions to literature, was published early in 1885. In it Pater displays, with perfected fullness and loving elaboration, his ideal of the aesthetic life, his cult of beauty as opposed to bare asceticism, and his theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal of its own. In 1887 he pub lished Imaginary Portraits, a series of essays in philosophic fiction; in 1889, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style; in 1893, Plato and Platonism; and in 1894, The Child in the House. His Greek Studies and his Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895; his posthumous romance of Gaston de Latour in 1896; and his Essays from the "Guardian" were privately printed in 1897. A collected edition of Pater's works was issued in 1901.
Pater changed his residence from time to time, living some times at Kensington and in different parts of Oxford; but the centre of his work and influence was always his rooms at Brasen ose. He wrote with difficulty, correcting and recorrecting with imperturbable assiduity. His mind, moreover, returned to the religious fervour of his youth, and those who knew him best be lieved that had he lived longer he would have resumed his boyish intention of taking holy orders. He was cut off, however, in the prime of his powers. He died on July 30, Pater's nature was so contemplative, and in a way so centred upon reflection, that he never perhaps gave full utterance to his individuality. His peculiar literary style, too, burnished like the surface of hard metal, was too austerely magnificent to be always persuasive. At the time of his death Pater exercised a remark able and a growing influence among that necessarily restricted class of persons who have themselves something of his own love for beauty and the beautiful phrase. But the cumulative richness and sonorous depth of his language harmonized intimately with his deep and earnest philosophy of life ; and those who can sym pathize with a nervous idealism will always find inspiration in his sincere and sustained desire to "burn with a hard, gem-like flame," and to live in harmony with the highest. (A. WA.) Mr. Ferris Greenslet's Walter Pater (in the "Contemporary Men of Letters" series, 1904) is an interesting piece of criticism. Mr. Arthur Benson's study in the "English Men of Letters" series (1906) , is admirable. See too a sketch in Edmund Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats; and an estimate from a Roman Catholic standpoint in Dr. William Barry's Heralds of Revolt, where Pater is compared with J. Adding ton Symonds. T. Wright's Life of Walter Pater (1907) is an elaborate but unsatisfactory piece of work. See E. Thomas, Walter Pater: A critical study (1913) ; also C. A. Stonehill, Bibliography of Modern Authors.