SOURCE: “Exhumation and Anachronism: Walter Pater and Nineteenth-Century Historicism,” in Victorians Institute Journal, Vol. 22, 1994, pp. 99-113.

In the following essay, Coates describes “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” as Pater's treatment of the conflict between historical difference and historical continuity.

May it be my part in the future, to have not attained, but marked the goal of history, to have called it a name that no one else had. Thierry called it narration, and M. Guizot analysis. I have named it resurrection, and this name will remain.

Jules Michelet, Le Peuple

In a bright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an open grave for a child—a dark space on the brilliant grass—the black mould lying heaped up around it, weighing down the little jewelled branches of the dwarf rose-bushes in flower.

Walter Pater, “The Child in the...